


Just Another Runaway

by MistyBeethoven



Series: "Yes, I Really Am This Pathetic!" or "How to Say I Love You With a Story" [44]
Category: The Neon Demon (2016)
Genre: Acceptance, Anger, Antisocial Character, Attraction, Avoidant Personality Disorder, BBW, Buses, California, Creepy, Creepy Fluff, Crime Scenes, Cunnilingus, Decisions, Denial of Feelings, Detectives, Doubt, F/M, Fat Shaming, Fear, First Dates, For Adults Only, Hiding, Hollywood, Hotel Sex, Hotels, Idiots in Love, Innocence, Investigation, Lies, Love, Love Confessions, Love Stories, Love/Hate, Masturbation, Masturbation in Shower, Missing Persons, Murder, Murder Mystery, Mystery, Neo Noir, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Opposites Attract, Overweight, Partnership, Predator/Prey, Protectiveness, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Second Chances, Self-Indulgent, Self-Insert, Showers, Singing, Violence, Weight Issues, Writers, faith - Freeform, managers, perverts, playing detective, runaways - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:35:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 32,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24032899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MistyBeethoven/pseuds/MistyBeethoven
Summary: Jerry's Motel is lorded over by an antisocial, middle aged man known as Hank and frequented by an assortment of beautiful teenage runaways he harbours in order to feed his perverted lusts and daydreams. Having come to Los Angeles to make it as a screenwriter, I am the oldest female at the Motel and find myself fascinated and repelled by Hank, whom seems to just loathe me in return.However, when a 13 year old runaway is violently murdered in room 214, and a girl named Jesse simultaneously disappears from room 212, I find myself believing Hanks frantic claims that he is innocent. Harboring the seedy motel manager, we find ourselves becoming attracted to each other as I try to find out what really happened in room 214 and if the man I love can really be innocent somewhere deep inside his deeply tainted soul.
Relationships: Hank (The Neon Demon) & Mikey, Hank (The Neon Demon)/Me, Jesse/Dean (The Neon Demon)
Series: "Yes, I Really Am This Pathetic!" or "How to Say I Love You With a Story" [44]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1589944
Comments: 24
Kudos: 9





	1. Behind Every Door a Runaway, Except Behind Two

**Author's Note:**

> Hank from "The Neon Demon"...
> 
> Reprehensible yet completely amusing and somehow likable. Probably a lot more to do with the fact that Keanu Reeves is playing him than the direction or script.
> 
> There were things in the film I liked because I like the unease surrealism leaves me with but the film wasn't able to do it as well as the king, David Lynch. The director, Nicolas Winding Refn, said it was because he did it in the spirit of the 16 year old girl he had trapped inside of him...and yeah. It felt like a 16 year girl had done it. One that was stereotypically shallow, pretentious, conceited, generally whiny and obsessed with fashion, looks, sex, violence, toying with lesbianism, witchcraft and perversions. So you succeeded there Refn. Whether that's a good thing or not is debatable. And I completely disagree with the pro-Narcissism of the film. Narcissism is NEVER a good thing even if one develops it to protect oneself. It will always be hurtful and damaging to others and the person themselves.
> 
> But anyway...I liked Keanu in the film. And this is my chance to tackle a Neo-Noir in this series. Because I have a thing for hardboiled detective stories and mysteries. Hank and the seedy world he lived in presented the perfect opportunity for me to delve into that genre.
> 
> Now shall we check into Jerry's Motel? Or should I say check out...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When a 13 year old rents room 214 at Jerry's Motel and I overhear Hank making obscene comments about her, I tell the motel manager that I am out of there.

Just another runaway.

That's all Carly Lynn was.

She must have had a last name but what that was exactly she never would tell me out of fear that I would send her back to wherever she had run away from before she had landed at Jerry's Motel in sunny California at the ripe old age of 13. Jerry's. A place run by a man named Hank whom enjoyed collecting runaways so he could spy on them and lust after them on the side. You could often catch him outside of his office trying to survey his seedy little kingdom and having a smoke. He had reached middle age a few years back, possessed small brown eyes which always seemed to be hiding some equally dark thought in his always working mind and a beard of brown to match the hair on top of his dirty minded head. He was a big framed man and physically intimidating.

Which turned me on although I could never confess it to him.

Hank and I never got along. Not at the start anyway. I was too old at 37 years old, when we first met, for his liking and too fat. He would have been just my type, oddly enough, if it wasn't for the fact that he was a pervert and scary as Hell. Unfortunately he could also be kind of funny in his own antisocial way too so I could never really hate the man no matter how much he seemed to despise me. The more I tried to win his kindness with my warmth the colder he became and so I tried even more out of desperation to try to make him like me even though he was a creep.

It reminded me of a quote from a Graham Greene novel that I had always remembered:

_"Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away."_

I was warm and Hank did not want me so he tossed my heart away but took my rent money every month. He was cold and unfathomably special to me, kept close to my heart behind the walls of my skin which there was too much of for his liking.

Of course, my age and my weight made me less of a draw for him to be able to pimp me out like the other girls whom stayed at his motel and that might have had more than a little to do with his animosity.

I had tried to save a few of the girls. I'd offer them money or tell them to call up their folks but you soon learn a few sad facts about runaways being around them for months as I was: most of them have a reason for not wishing to go back home again. You found out that they had already lost their innocence to somebody they should have been able to trust: a father, an uncle, a stepfather...Even a mother or aunt sometimes. They came with bruises to Jerry's motel, on their bodies or on their souls and the pleading in their eyes made you not phone up the cops as you would have previously believed that you should do. So many things die in Hollywood and beliefs were just a few of them.

Dreams.

Dreams died too. I'd come out here from Ontario, Canada not to make it as an actress, I could not fool myself into that particular belief, but to be a screenwriter instead. I'd been trying ever since and failing miserably. That was how I came to stay at Jerry's and made my introduction to Hank and his group of teenage runaways.

Carly Lynn arrived the day before I finally told Hank I would be leaving. She was my main reason for making the announcement, in a way, because I'd heard what Hank had said about her to the boyfriend of another runaway named Jesse.

If Carly Lynn had never come to California with some young girl's dream of being a star and some demon close on her heels she'd never have met Hank. 

And if she'd never have met Hank she would have lived to see 14.

* * *

My room was just over the motel manager's office and I could practically hear every single thing he did below me, thankfully barring him taking a leak or dump.

I'd been in a room across the way for a while until Hank had moved me to my then current room. He'd made some joke about the reason being that then he wouldn't have to see my gross, fat little body and I really should have left then and there when the tears were stinging my eyes but all I had done was foolishly move. Without much of an income, Jerry's was one of the few options for me in the city. And I was still hoping in vain for some sign from the jerk that he did like me afterall. So I had dragged all of my belongings, an Underwood typewriter, 575 pages of various screenplays and 375 sheets of blank paper, my clothing, books and stuffed toys to the room above Hank's where I would listen to his actions all day and his amusing and sometimes disgusting conversations with a man named Mikey.

Over the last few hours their talk, mostly from Hank since Mikey was virtually a mute, had focused mostly on the mountain lion they had had to drag out of Jesse's room, 214. They laughed and acted all balls and machismo. The worst part was that they had actually been actually pretty brave with the beast.

When Jesse had come rapping on Hank's green metal door below it had woken me up instantly. I'd then left my room and watched the two men eventually forcing the creature out of the room and across the courtyard out into the wilderness of California. They hadn't dare call animal control or anything else remotely official unless the persons who came decided to have a look in any of the other rooms. I'd stood on the balcony and looked down at Hank and folded my arms as Mikey ran after the wildcat with his baseball bat. Both men never flinched. Hank must have seen me out of the corner of his eyes or maybe he just felt me staring. He suddenly looked up at me and I just as suddenly realized how short my nightshirt was.

"Should I have sent it up to your room, Erin?" he called up to me. "Finally give me a little action to overhear up there?"

I shook my head. It struck me as absurdly ironic that I was the oldest person renting a room at Jerry's Motel but that I was still a virgin. Obviously due to our close proximity and Hank's hobby as a voyeur it had not escaped him that I had been lonely ever since I had checked in.

Boldly I retorted, "I prefer my lions with manes."

"I'm sure the cougar would have appreciated it better. Probably not as many fat rabbit up where it came down from," Hank remarked, without looking at me, cruelly before stomping back to his office, Mikey following closely behind him.

I stayed out on the balcony and grabbed the railing, trying to compose myself. I hated his words and the fact that it bothered me equally as much that he hadn't tried to look up my nightshirt as he had passed under me. I'd seen that he hadn't stopped checking out Jesse's ass all the way to her room. She was 16 and beautiful though as opposed to me. Still I'd have loved to see his eyes trying to sneak a peek between my own legs. Being infatuated with a man that was a pervert was one thing but that he was turning me into one as well was doubly upsetting.

Now, though, Jesse's boyfriend had come to pay for the damages committed by the mountain lion and Hank was greeting him with the same hospitality that he showed everybody that happened to cross his path.

It was amusing in a way. Hank was his usual belligerent self but with his delivery it was funny even if I had been on the opposite end of it more times than it was comfortable to remember. It wasn't so cute anymore when he started to tell Jesse's boyfriend about Carly Lynn, however, and referred to her as a _Lolita_. I guessed it was accurate in a way. The girl dressed far older than she was and seemed sexually precocious like Nabokov's infamous nymphet. But it made me uncomfortable to hear it alongside Hank's proclamation to the man that the girl was "Room Two-Fourteen! Gotta be seen!"

She was 13 years old for crying out loud! I'd never seen Hank force himself on any of the younger girls here but I had seen him looking. The man was a predator but I'd never witnessed him take down any prey. If I had I would have been out of there. His words stuck in my head though and as I lay with my back on the mattress and my head staring at the cracked ceiling I hated having stayed at Jerry's Motel even for this long.

Several seconds after the younger man had left and Hank had closed his green metal door, I flew off of the bed, my brown auburnish hair in a mess of curls behind me and ran to leave my room. Running down the stairs, I reached Hank's door and started banging on it. I heard the manager swearing inside and when he opened the door I knew he was expecting to see me.

Little wonder why really; He'd probably heard every step I had made on my way down.

"Yeah?" he demanded. "I'm missing People's Court, here. Make it snappy. Plumbing, rodents or roaches?"

I stared into brown eyes that obviously saw me as little more than another pest in the motel he lorded over and cursed myself once again for having stayed this long.

"I'm going to be leaving soon," I commented.

Hank's mouth opened, just a little, and he took two steps out of his office as he continued to glare at me. "What's the problem?" he inquired suddenly and I thought he looked as momentarily upset as I felt. Believing that it had to do with some perceived insult directed at his motel, I sighed.

"I just heard you call Carly Lynn a Lolita!" I stated in disgust.

"Carly Lynn?" he asked in confusion, slamming the door behind him.

I saw a shadow appear through the screen and knew it was his often silent lackey Mikey coming to make sure his owner wasn't being mistreated.

"The girl in Room 214," I informed him and watched his face go from understanding to outrage in a heartbeat.

"You've been trying to save the girls here again, snowflake?" he demanded.

"She's so young," I bemoaned. "She needs somewhere safe, Hank, and this place and _you_ aren't it."

"I never touched her!" Hank yelled at me. 

"I heard what you were saying about her!"

Hank rubbed a hand over his bearded face and inhaled deeply, looking like an irritated dragon. "You should be getting mad at that guy that just left! He's making the moves on 212 and she certainly ain't legal either. I was just tossing the fact that I knew he liked them young in his pretty boy face was all. I called Jesse hard candy; You gonna rake me over the coals for that one, soft candy?"

I shook my head and ignored yet another insult hurled at me. It sounded possible and I could fool myself into believing it but my conscience was finally not letting me forgive the motel manager quite so easily. "I still think I should leave," I said more to myself than to Hank.

The hulking man took a lumbering step closer towards me and I looked up to see that he was staring down at me in the same unique annoyance he seemed to have reserved especially for me. "Why you wanna do that? You finally sell one of your stupid stories? The ones about detectives and ghosts?"

I gasped. I'd never shared any of my ideas with the man let alone ever let him read my work. How he knew I liked to merge noir tales with the supernatural, two opposing genres, startled me. I suddenly knew that being the motel's manager it wouldn't have been too difficult for Hank to let himself in whenever I was out and for him to go through my stuff.

"Have you been in my room and reading my stories?" I asked him and tried to probe his dark eyes to see a more truthful answer than I would likely ever be given.

"Nah snowflake," he spat back. "You're just an easy one to read. Seems right you'd write some stupid bullshit like that."

I was hurt once again. I turned around to leave but couldn't resist looking back once to hurl my own insult back at him. "You know at least Humbert Humbert knows he's a monster by the end of that novel. When are you going to realize that's what you are too, Hank?" I said. I wanted it to come off tough but I was too badly shaking which made my words tremble too, making me seem only a snowflake melting in the LA heat like he thought I was.

Rushing up the stairs, I heard Hank standing there silently under me as I went back inside of my room. He'd started to smoke a cigarette and amazingly had gotten his lighter to work for once. I maybe should have been happy so then the man stood a decent chance of developing lung cancer and dying, freeing the world of a creep. But I wasn't. As the scent of nicotine reached my own lungs, I only wanted him to live as long as he could.

Long enough to maybe change someday.


	2. If the Heart Possessed a Door, A Monster Behind Mine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I find a new hotel to stay at but share a tense discussion with Hank as I give him my final rent payment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated this and my "Feeling Minnesota" fic.

I spent a lot of time after that looking for a new place to stay. Thinking of Hank and his ways, all the things I liked about him and all of the things that I loathed were never far from my mind. As was the refreshed discovery that Jerry's Motel really _did_ have the best rates. If I stayed at the competitor with the closest price I was looking at about a $20 raise in rent each week. That might not have seemed a lot but right now I had been having a difficult enough time trying to hand Hank his money every Friday.

My screenwriting career being a bust I had had to turn to an employment agency to find some kind of work. I was thrown an occasional cleaning gig which I supplemented by doing online work. These usually included surveys, reviews and stuff. You weren't paid fantastically like the ad banners at the various sites claimed or suggested you would be but any bit helped. Jerry's was nice because the wifi was free. Just another way for Hank to lure pretty young maidens into his den. He was ever clever in his exploitation tactics.

I made enough to have shelter and to eat. From the size of me you'd think I wasn't starving and I wasn't but, well, I ate only one lousy meal a day and about a bag of chips and a chocolate bar for breakfast. That's what I could afford. Sometimes being big had nothing to do with overeating but just because you're stupid body was holding tight to the fat it had had for so long. Not eating enough could equally keep you trapped in a body you were often made to feel ashamed of, I had discovered. Fight and flight...you didn't keep it satisfied with enough food and it thought you were in danger so your metabolism slowed to a crawl making you remain overweight. And all those good healthy foods that could help you? Well those just cost too damn much to consider when you did your grocery shopping every week.

Obesity, poverty...it all was a cycle which was too hard to runaway from. Just like Hank must have found it difficult to stop being a creep and I did likewise being attracted to him in spite of the fact.

I eventually caved in and made an agreement with Joe, the guy who ran the Sunset Motel, to give him half of my rent for the month upfront. There was one last room left and it was the only way he would let me have it. But he promised me I could, at least, move in immediately. The room was a little nicer than my one at Jerry's; the wallpaper wasn't so damn creepy nor was Joe so much of an outward pervert. The Sunset's guests were not just teenage runaways but an assortment of people, male and female youthful and elderly. Infact, I thought the elderly outnumbered the young, properly matching the setting of the sun name of the place.

A theme which had passed by the time I had walked all the way back to Jerry's. There was no trace of a sun hanging over Los Angeles. Night had arrived. There was only darkness and the neon glow of the false moons and stars from the lights and signs strung all over town, trying to do battle with the real deal hanging in a midnight blue sky above them.

After paying Joe up front in cash, I had been left with just a twenty dollar bill which I was holding and staring at as I returned to what had been my home for months now but would no longer be it come tomorrow.

"Hey!" I heard someone say from the darkness of some alcove in the motel. I didn't need to raise my head to know whom was addressing me but I did anyway.

Hank was walking towards me. He was still smoking and looked at me and my twenty dollars through the dark night all around us. It must have been that same darkness which made me think there was something odd about the way he was looking at me, something stranger than the gaze he reserved for me during our usual encounters.

Then again, the whole atmosphere seemed unnerving. It felt like those moments before it stormed in a way. The air surrounding you suddenly felt as if it was conspiring against you somehow. The cricket sounds became hushed whispers that you were grateful you couldn't understand because there was no chance you'd overhear anything nice. I suddenly felt worried for myself, for Hank and for all of the runaways behind the doors. It felt like the motel had become a monster in one frighteningly quick moment and was prepared to swallow us after a few painfully slow chews.

"You should be up in your room," he admonished and I wondered if he didn't feel it too...the eeriness we'd fallen into while the young princesses around us presumably slept or turned their tricks. "Never know when that mountain lion will find its way back."

"I thought you said that would be interesting," I replied in soft accusation. "If it was in my room."

Hank peered down at me silently. In my self conciousness I extended my hand holding the twenty dollar bill towards him. "Here," I stated. "I owe this to you: The rent for the days I stayed. I found a new place."

The man seemed to stop breathing for a second or two as my hand remained holding the money up between us. Eyes that seemed like small, black holes without so much as a glint shared between them burrowed into mine but I held his gaze, knowing I would be robbed of the sight of it soon enough. It was ironic. Here I was shy to the point of emotional distress whenever I had to talk to someone. Yet this monster whom had tormented me so often I could feel wonderfully content and comfortable with when he was by my side.

He abruptly and unexpectedly took hold not only of the money but of my wrist too.

"I often wondered where you found the cash to pay me with, snowflake. When you went out you weren't taking it from those fat loving freaks were you? Letting them have you...letting 'em feel up all that you got? How'd they want it anyway?"

I kept staring into his eyes as I felt his fingers hot and tight around my flesh. His touch was making the hair on the back of my neck stand up, along with the nipples on my breasts. If he looked down he'd see that my arm was covered in goose pimples. His voice had the same effect on me as his touch. His breath reached the skin on my face. It was moist and warm and smelled of cigarettes and a million other vices. "Is that what you were trying to find out when you were going through my room? When you read my work?" I asked.

More silence as we stood locked in that position and each other's surprisingly steady gaze. "No," I finally answered his question before he seemed even willing to consider answering mine. "I write reviews, do surveys; I clean buildings and houses when I go out."

This confession seemed to please him and he finally ripped the money out of my hand and threw my wrist, still throbbing from the strong grip he'd had on it, away from him. Studying Andrew Jackson's face he joked, "Well you're still down on your hands and knees all day so I was close."

I carefully studied each line and curve on Hank's own face and knew that I was in love with him and probably would always be. "Why'd you never try to pimp me out?" I asked him suddenly finding it odd behavior from him. He was aware that some men, unlike himself, liked their woman big. I'd thought he'd been ignorant of the fact and too disgusted of the possibility before to have contemplated it.

He laughed loudly a sound which momentarily scared the crickets away from their nasty whispers. "Who'd have you? Speaking of which, where you staying now, snowflake?"

I told him and listened to Hank snicker and watched as he shook his head in disbelief. "The Sunset is for old farts. Why you staying there?"

"Because I'm getting older too," I quoted Stevie Nicks at him. "Isn't that what you're always telling me, Hank?"

Two black holes found me again and the motel manager frowned down at me. "Well you are the oldest one here. In two ways."

"Me and _you_ ," I corrected.

We both were the oldest even if I was over a decade younger than he was. I could have imagined once long ago that we could have played mother and father to all the runaways that managed to find their way to Jerry's. Instead all reality held was a woman whom was as hopelessly lost in a way as they were and a father figure whom couldn't stop leering at them living amongst their tainted innocence.

"Yes," Hank retorted. "But I had no choice. What's your excuse? Especially when you hate me so fucking much?"

"But I don't hate you," I confessed. "That's probably the worst thing about you: That I can't hate you...oh I should, with the amount of jibes you've made about my weight and that, worst of all, you use these poor girls you should be helping instead. But I just can't hate you for some reason. God only knows why. I do hate myself for not being able to though. But it doesn't matter now, does it?"

Tired beyond belief suddenly as if the air was a sleeping draught and the crickets sounds were no longer rumours but a lullaby trying to lull me into sleep, I wearily walked past the man towards the staircase and my room. I wanted to get out of here as fast as I could even while I wanted to stay forever just to listen to the sounds Hank made throughout the day as he existed in his forever static and unchanging state.

"Snowflake" Hank said, stopping me halfway up the stairs. "Everybody has some type of fetish or kink here. They hide it behind the doors or they hide it inside of their dirty minds or filthy little hearts. What was yours? I could never figure that one out, Erin."

Even though he had used my Christian name for once, I didn't turn back this time but kept on walking.

When I reached my room and my bed, I fell down on to the matress and started to weep. Even though I knew that the walls were thin and that Hank could probably hear me if he had returned to his office after our moonlight discussion, I still couldn't help but cry out in final answer, "It was you."


	3. A Closed Door on the Painful Past Behind but No Future Ahead of Her

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I catch Hank coming out of room 214 after the sound of screaming wakes me from a deep yet restless sleep.

I must have fallen asleep from the heat, my sorrow and the fatigue of the whole miserable situation I had fallen into like the wrong roll of the dice could land you in jail on a Monopoly board. However, I was soon awoken not by any sun streaming in from a window nor the scream of an alarm clock. Oh something was screaming all right but whatever it was was made of flesh and blood and not cogs and wheels. The sound of a woman crying out pulled me jarringly out of my sleep and successfully bypassed that land of grog and sawdust on the brain which usually first met anyone upon first waking. Bolting up on my mattress, I suddenly realized that it wasn't a woman crying at all; it was a young girl. It was Carly.

I wish I could say that I immediately jumped up off of the bed and ran to the door in order to play hero but I didn't. Her screams were so terrified and wounded that my own survival instinct pushed me backwards rather than forward. But I did eventually rush to the door even if it took me a very long thirty seconds to do it. There was that consolation later, at least, but it wasn't much...Especially after I saw room 214's testament to what had happened there while I had been hesitating alone in my room.

There were too many steps away from where I was, so frustratingly close to Hank's office, and Carly Lynn's room. Her screams stopped before I was halfway there. I didn't know how long the poor child had been screaming for, I realized. I had been pretty knocked out from walking all over the city looking for a new place to stay that the girl could have been shrieking bloody murder for a good fifteen minutes and I probably would have kept right on sleeping my dreamless and uneasy sleep. I knew I was too late even as i was rushing up the stairs to the flight her apartment was on. Death seemed to push ahead in line to become the only viable option of why Carly Lynn would go from yelling so loudly that God could hear her to a silence as if she had never even been there at all.

On the landing, my eyes on the door to room 214, I realized that it was already open. A rectangle of light emanated from it onto the floor ahead of me and my heart leapt up as I watched someone backing out of the door itself. It was Hank. His face wore the most haunted expression I had ever seen on it and his hand was covering his mouth in pure horror. I was about to say his name when he fell to his knees on the ground and started to vomit. Believing he wouldn't be able to hear me past the sounds of his violent retching, I kept my own mouth shut until I was behind him.

"Hank," I whispered and placed a hand on his shoulder as I looked up at the room and felt my heart stop halfway during its present beat.

In the films when they usually depict a murder, they like to often use a lot of blood. There is so much sometimes, in fact, that I used to wonder if the human body could _really_ hold all that much; until I spilt my glass of cola, that is and saw how that looked like a small lake which got everywhere. They do it for effect: the sharp contrast of the red, as if somewhere deep inside that color can jolt us more than any other because we know that it is the color of the blood inside of us, working to keep us alive. Blood is life, it shouldn't be seen. And when we _do_ see it we automatically know that we are in danger somehow.

There really wasn't a lot of blood in Carly Lynn's room though. Most of it was on the mattress where she was lying. The thing which had made my heart stop was the sight of Carly Lynn herself. A little girl isn't meant to be lying on a red stained mattress with her eyes large and frightened but no longer seeing anything. She's meant to be playing with dolls or making that transition from them to daydreaming about boys instead, maybe trying on some of her mother's makeup and praying she doesn't get caught. This little girl's lips were painted but not with any lipstick manufactured by Maybelline or Covergirl. It was blood which glistengl around her mouth and that garnered my attention more than the puddle of it that she was lying in. Her legs looked spread...too far...like she was the wishbone at Thanksgiving but one when it had been pulled yet had refused to break.

She was _broken,_ though, and nobody could ever fix her. Her body now imitated the soul she had brought with her when she had first checked into Jerry's Motel not too long ago.

Hank kept heaving and I absently rubbed his back as I studied the rest of the room which looked trashed. This act was not the work of a mountain lion: This was the work of a human monster.

"Hank what..."

I looked down to see that the man's hands splayed out several inches above his own puke were covered in blood and I backed away into the rail behind me.

"No," I said and shook my head.

Hearing the word, Hank swiftly spun his head around to look at me and I noticed a trail of his vomit trailing out of the corner of his mouth just like the blood falling from Carly Lynn's lips.

"I didn't fucking do it!" he hissed at me. "The doorknob..."

My eyes went to it and I saw that it was covered in blood and what looked like human hair. Looking back to Carly I saw that a chunk of her pretty hair was missing from her poor battered head.

"It was covered in it," Hank continued. "It was jammed. I had to fucking well use both hands to push the damn thing open! You think that I'd..."

"No," I said but my OCD said that he was guilty as Hell and my love for him was only preventing me from seeing that fact.

Knowing my OCD mind could never be completely trusted, I closed my eyes and listened to my real logic. Remembering clearly the sight of the Motel manager throwing up and his very real seeming horror I calmed myself down. Why, if Hank had done this, would it have made him violently ill? It didn't make any sense. Still my unwanted thoughts tried to pry me away from my reasoning with several implausible counter arguments. Trying not to hear them, I opened my eyes again only to find Hank staring up at me. He looked as angry and pissed off as he ever did. But there was fear mixed in with it also now. And the barf at the corner of his lips was there to give strength to my faith in the man, creep that he was.

"I believe you," I reassured him. 

He immediately rose to his feet and grabbed me by the shoulders. "They're gonna think I did this...the cops will come and..."

"We gotta get you outta here then," I cried, not knowing what on earth I was doing but trying to protect the object of my affection and the source of my constant torment. 

I grabbed a hold of his wrist even while he stood there too shocked and confused to urge his feet into motion. I tugged on his wrist again and looked down at his feet only to see a splinter of wood by the momentarily paralyzed man's feet. Not comprehending fully why, I quickly bent down and picked it up, shoving it into my pocket.

"COME ON!" I shouted at Hank. Shaking his bearded head, he finally allowed me to pull him down the landing towards Jerry's Motel's exit.

We both ran all the way; only I was stupid enough to look back, however. I think I felt I owed it to Carly Lynn to offer one frantic glance back in her direction. I half expected to see the ghost of the girl looking down at us both fleeing from her corpse with accusation in those wide, horrified and unseeing eyes.

What I did not see was not her but someone else watching us go.

In the room next door to the dead girl's, I saw Jesse witnessing our exodus. Her blue eyes adopted a new and frightening look of apathy which did not suit her usually innocent face. It was as if by hearing Carly Lynn's murder a part of her had died as well.

"COME ON WOMAN!" I soon heard Hank yelling at me, throwing my own command back in my face after realizing I was falling behind him and he was now dragging me.

I picked up my pace and it was only as I did that I knew where I was taking the man I both hated and loved: the Sunset Motel.

As we passed several pedestrians and streetwalkers it struck me as just another unexpected event, in a day filled with them, that I was voluntarily bringing to the new home I had found the very same man I had been trying to escape from.

Only then he had just been a pervert.

Now he was also possibly a killer.

And yet I ran as fast as I ever had in my life, my sole desire to keep him both safe and sound. Something I had not managed to do with a poor little dead runaway named Carly Lynn.


	4. A Locked Door Made of Wood Behind and, In front, One Made of Flesh and Bone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I hide Hank at the Sunset Motel with me and get a glimpse that his disgust towards me may not be what it seems.

My room at the Sunset was still waiting patiently for me when I returned to it, my unexpected guest by my side. We were both wheezing badly by the time Hank threw open the door and immediately went to the queen size bed and sat at the end of it, panting badly and trying to catch his breath. I remained standing, closing the door behind me firmly and then resting my back against it. I was trying to calm my racing heart and find my breath also when Hank turned to watch me and I shifted in my sneakers in embarrassment from his gaze.

"You...need to lose some...weight, snowflake," he criticized even as he struggled with each word. "Don't...want you to...take...a heart attack and...get blamed for...that too."

I wanted to scream at him, appalled that even after I had tried to save him he was still trying to shame me for my weight, but didn't want to waste whatever breath I had managed to reclaim. Especially when it would just give the man the satisfaction of knowing he had hurt me, which I assumed was what he had wanted to do. Retaliating with some insult regarding Hank's own weight seemed pointless. I liked his size; any rude remark would have been false and hardly worth the effort.

Walking away from the door, after making sure first that I had locked it, I sat on the edge of the bed perpendicular to where the motel manager was currently sitting. I ran a hand through my hair and then held myself as I started to remember poor Carly Lynn's vacant eyed stare and her broken body which had resembled a lewd piece of artwork constructed with an oversized doll. While my trembling intensified, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Hank's own visible distress was lessening.

He calmed himself enough, infact, to go to the bathroom where I heard the sound of running water. Hank returned drying his hands off, now free from blood, on a towel, which he threw on to the floor. He then sat back in the same spot he had left.

"I pray to God that nobody saw me come in here with you," he snorted. "Bad for business on two fronts: walking into my rival's and being with a fat chick on top of it."

My shaking now contained two causes to match the reasons for my companion's shame: a little girl's murder and the painful company of the verbally abusive man I unfortunately loved.

"Well, I don't think you have to worry about that first one, at least," I bitterly remarked. "It'll be pretty hard to run your precious Jerry's from behind a set of bars. And a fat chick is hopefully preferrable to a Bubba in your cell, Hank."

He spun around to glare at me instantly. His eyes were small black pearls that burned with an oil like anger ready to ignite. "I TOLD YOU I DIDN'T DO IT!" he shouted and I cringed knowing that the walls in the Sunset were probably not all that much thicker than the ones at Jerry's.

I placed both of my hands on Hank's left one which was resting on the bed beside me. "Shhhh," I whispered imploringly. "Remember half these people are over seventy. If you raise your voice you'll wake them up. One complaint and I'm out of here and you along with me."

Something in my eyes seemed to convince the man that my words held some bit of wisdom. His usually tough face softened and he spun back to his former position facing away from me. I watched as the back of his head moved around and could tell that he was studying the room. After two minutes he laughed and poor Carly Lynn might as well have been little more than the ad at the start of a Youtube video to him: suffered through for thirty seconds and then instantly forgotten about.

"Sheesh," he commented. "This the kind of dump that Shawn runs and calls a motel? Look at that wallpaper...and these crummy bedsheets. Guess he figured most of his geriatric tenants don't see well anymore so no need to bother."

Although, I could have pointed out that the room was nicer than any of his, I opted not to. Instead I reprimanded, "A little girl died and you're planning your Travel Advisor review for the Sunset Motel?"

Hank turned to look at me angrily again. "Yeah! Why the Hell not? She's dead anyway; no amount of fuckin' tears are gonna bring her back."

"But at least it shows that you cared! That you're human!"

"Why bother? I'm not human to you or anybody else anyway," he spat, almost sounding greviously wounded, and turned to face away from me once more.

"You think I'm a monster or else you wouldn't have checked in to this shithole."

Getting tired of all this head turning, I stood from off of the matress to sit by his side. Every step reminded me painfully of the speed with which I had forced them to move to get Hank and myself to safety. They lambasted me with anger until I flopped down next to Hank and continued to wai even then. Hank was manspreading so I couldn't get too close. I wasn't going to complain though; I didn't have to deal with all that junk down south men did. And besides, the motel manager was like the mountain lion I had seen him helping to drive out of Jesse's room: beautiful to look at but dangerous to get within biting distance of.

"I don't think you're a complete monster," I meekly reassured him without daring to look at him incase he saw how much I loved him. "You're not very nice but you could never do what was back in 214."

 _"Are you so sure, Erin?"_ my OCD voice whispered. _"Are_ _you sure he couldn't?"_

I closed my eyes tightly as I blocked the voice out, my common way of dealing with OCD and one which made me wonder if it was related to Tourettes sometimes. Opening my eyes and praying he hadn't seen me battling with my inner bully, I found him still staring dejectedly at the floor between his widely spaced knees. He looked so unexpectedly lost that I was moved to take his bearded head in my hands and turn it towards me so he would meet my eyes. Always the stubborn fool, he resisted at first until I applied a little more pressure. Offering a shy but hopefully warm smile, I timidly confessed, "I've always liked you, Hank. " My nipples unexpectedly tingled from the power and risk of opening my heart up to the man.

"Why were you going to leave me then?" he asked, and his eyes usually so harsh, sheilded and cold suddenly looked very human and exposed.

He was almost like a child, in that instant, whose mother had abandoned them with no warning or explanation. Suddenly Hank, the perverted middle aged man that ran Jerry's, didn't seem so much like a jerk but like just another lost, damaged and frightened runaway hiding away in a falling apart motel in the city. I couldn't find the strength or required courage to tell him that I had been running away, as well, couldn't reveal to the owner of my heart that I had been tired of him leering at all of the underaged girls but never at fat, little, old me. Nor could I tell him how much that I loved him and that he was precious to me. If he possessed a decently working cell in his thick skull, one that hadn't been twisted by the filth rags he constantly read or the porn he paid for on his digital box, he might have figured it out for himself. Instead my feelings for Hank seemed to be as hidden from him as the well in the desert had been from Hagar.

Not ready to leave my heart opened and vulnerable to the man, I decided, selfishly and cowardly, to focus on his own intimation instead. "I didn't know that it was important that I stay," I said gently, rubbing my thumb into the suprising softness of his beard.

Our eyes locked in that fashion, as I touched him almost sensually, was almost too intimate an act for Hank; I could see fear flash in his eyes before he turned forcefully away. "Course I do. A rent payment is a rent payment. A lot of teenage bimbos ain't what you'd call responsible. And you were always easy to put up with, at least. Not a wild child like some of the girls. And no guys presenting an unecessary hassle."

That last was intended to be another one of his usual barbs at my expense. But, I knew that, more than that, it had been a way for him to push himself away from whatever had passed between us when I had been carelessly stroking his face. He was seeking, not only to slam that door shut, but to lock it as well. A return to his insults offered him his getaway. Still it had sounded too weak on his tongue somehow and nowhere near the sincerity of his request of an answer to as why I had left him.

Giving the man the space he desired, I found myself needing some too, as well. My sudden suspicion that Hank was actually more fond of me than I had previously suspected had taken me off guard. It was almost like receiving a sweet Valentine from the boy whom had mercilessly teased you throughout fifth grade.

"Hank, do you know of anybody that would kill Carly Lynn?" I asked, my mind jumping to the poor girl whom wasn't too long out of fifth grade herself.

"What?" he snapped. "You expect me to be able to write her fucking biography after knowing her for all of a couple of hours?"

I shook my head. I was trying to help the loser but he was still swiping at me like that lion would if anybody was simply trying to lead it back to the wild. "No. But did you see anybody around room 214? I mean, maybe her family came looking for her. Maybe whomever she was running away from in the first place?"

"No. There was that guy, though. The one that has the hard on for room 212. He was hanging around her alot, looking to see if she won't give him a piece of her nice ass. That little girl's room was next door. I mentioned her to him remember? It's what got your knickers in a knot. Maybe miss pretty blonde thing turned him down and he went calling on her neighbour instead. Guys get turned on so much they go looking for whatever will spare them a case of blue balls."

_"Maybe he knows what he's talking about because that's what happened...only he was the one afraid of getting blue balls. So he..."_

Eyes shut tightly again, I focused on the room numbers on all the doors at Jerry's instead of that voice associated with doubt. I'd often wanted to ask Hank what had happened to room 213 but had always just assumed it was the same logic as elevators skipping floor 13 out of superstition. Hank was a dirty minded scoundrel but he was a cunning one at that, as well.

Considering his proposition that Jesse's boyfriend had been the killer, I, at first, dismissed his theory, but then thought that it did hold a chance. Jesse was a good girl and smart too. She didn't seem the type to just hop into bed with a photographer to further her career, although there were plenty of those whom would in L.A. And though her boyfriend seemed alright looks were the most deceptive thing about a person. It was possible if Jesse had turned him down, knowing that a younger girl, one whom would provide less of a struggle, was so closeby might have been too much for him. And Jesse _had_ been staring at Hank and I as we had fled.

"That's a possibility," I stated.

"Hell, yeah, it's a possibility," Hank said and stood angrily, already convinced that his theory was the absolute truth. "I'm gonna go drag that guy's name out of Miss Wildcat herself."

He was starting to head for the door when I grabbed a fierce hold of his hand. "No!" I yelled and then lowered my voice. "You can't go back there! Jerry's is probably swarming with cops by now!"

"So?" he snapped, glowering down at me. "And I can hand them who they are looking for."

"And right now that would be _you_!" I returned sassily. "They are going to ask the other girls whom showed the most interest in Carly Lynn and it's _you_ , Hank! Your reputation as a creep is well known at Jerry's! You've worked on it far too well!"

Hank shook his hand free from mine, exhaled in frustration, and then ran it through his head of thick, dark hair.

"You're also too much of a hothead," I spoke truthfully. "Let me go back tomorrow and see what I can find out."

Suddenly gazing down at me, Hank said words I did not expect to ever pass by his lips. "I can't let you do that; I don't want you to get hurt."

The lock had come undone again and I was offered another glimpse into Hank's affectionate feelings for me, feelings I had thought were nonexistent.

My heart honestly glowed then and also felt as guilty for the emotion as possible. Carly Lynn was dead and there I was overjoyed that Hank cared for me after all. I was as bad as I had just chastised the motel manager for being.

"I'll be fine," I told him and we stared at each other for a little bit longer than either of us was comfortable with.

"You look tired," I stated. "I am too. Let's get to bed."

"The same one?" he asked, almost seeming frightened again.

I nodded.

"You sure there's enough room with that big body of yours?" he inquired, returning to his usual hurtful self.

"We can try it," I said, kicking off my sneakers and crawling in to the bed where I swiftly crawled beneath the covers.

"You're in your day clothes," Hank stated as if this would prevent us from going to bed together.

"Yeah, my night ones are back at Jerry's. So is my toothbrush and toothpaste. We make do with what we are given, Hank."

Hank looked to one side of the room at the Sunset Motel and then to the other. I was half expecting him to sleep on the floor when he finally crawled into the bed beside me and faced the other way. While saying my prayers inside of my head, asking for Carly Lynn's soul to have a safe flight back home, her real killer to be found and for a way to help clear Hank's name, I heard a voice pop up and interupt me.

"Thank you," Hank whispered, offering me two more words I had never expected to hear from the man.

"You're very welcome," I gave him two back with an added one for good measure before resuming my one sided conversation with God, whom was hopefully busy welcoming a poor broken little girl back into His arms.


	5. Peeking, in Secret, Behind a Bathroom Door

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After leaving our motel room to get Hank his breakfast and cigarettes, I return to see two things I hadn't intended to; one makes me excited while the other unnerves me.

It was a restless sleep but sleep did finally come eventually. I woke up once when I felt Hank sitting down on the bed as if he'd just been somewhere or done something. He looked at me almost guiltily and stated bluntly, "I had to go take a leak."

I nodded and then nestled under the covers as I pulled them closer around my body. I was aware of Hank lying closely next to me. His wide, long back and full ass almost touching my own. I was a big girl and he was a big man so there wasn't that much space left over for emptiness on the mattress in my room at the Sunset Motel. I'd never slept beside another human being that I was not related to. My mother and sister I'd both shared a bed with and I remembered sleeping next to my grandfather once. He had been the only man I had ever lay down next to. Being next to Hank made me simultaneously nervous and excited. I'd harbored a few daydreams about it in the past, usually involving some type of sexual activity. But while a whole lot more was going on between the motel manager and myself in them, this was far more fulfilling in its way because it was _real_.

Hank trusted me enough to let me help him avoid being imprisoned by the police. I felt that for someone like Hank, with his arrogance and cruelty, his deep suspicions and resentments that this was almost a miracle in a way. One born under a flashing neon sign and in the blood of a little girl but a miracle nonetheless.

I managed to fall asleep one more time, listening to the sound of Hank's snoring, another aspect left out of my fantasies, but a sound no less beautiful to me inspite of that.

* * *

In the morning, I was awake before my sleeping bear of a fugitive. I crawled out from under the sheets as quietly as I could but my small amount of movement was still enough to wake him.

"It's morning?" he stated brusquely, reading both the sun coming in through the small space left in between the slightly parted curtains and the alarm clock on the nightstand declaring it was 10:10 am.

"Yeah," I replied, rushing to the bathroom before I had an accident.

Hank was sitting up on the bed when I came back.  
"I sure am hungry," he remarked.

I looked at him completely nonplussed. Apparently the fact that he'd puked up his supper last night in front of room 214 had come back to torment him in the morning light. How he could manage to find his appetite after only a few hours of having discovered Carly Lynn's body was a far smaller mystery than who had killed the runaway but a mystery all the same.

"You want some breakfast?" I asked, folding my arms and smirking.

"Well don't you? Given your apparent fondness for eating, and all" he asked, looking unashamedly at the tummy under my folded arms. It looked even bigger standing like that so I sighed and let my arms hang down by my sides again.

"You'll find that I probably don't eat as much as you do, Hank," I commented.

"And how would you know what I eat, snowflake?" he asked both confrontational and curious.

I rolled my eyes. "I live right by you," I reminded him. "I see the pizza boxes or styrofoam containers that the endless parade of delivery boys bring for you and Mikey to inhale. They can hardly see over them."

Hank looked almost embarrassed but also defiant. "Yeah, well we both don't cook."

"I'll have to make you a decent meal sometime," I offered. "You know, with all four food groups? You remember those, don't you?"

"Yeah," Hank replied. "Grease, sugar, alcohol and nicotine."

I laughed and to my surprise Hank joined in warmly.

Becoming self conscious, I shifted on my feet and looked towards the door. "There's a convenience next to us. I'll hop on over and get breakfast."

"Get me a pack of cigarettes too," Hank ordered more than asked. He reached into his pocket and threw a few twenties on to the bottom of the bed at me.

"Oh great," I snorted as I walked to the door after picking them up. "I'm saving you from prison so you can die of lung cancer."

"As a free man, snowflake," the man called out to me as I left. "As a _free_ man."

* * *

I came back with my arms full of a paper bag filled with anything decent I could find at the next door store. And some indecent things as well. As I walked through the door, I immediately became aware that, speaking of indecent, my unexpected roommate was probably in that state as well. His clothes were strewn all over the motel room floor and I could hear the shower running in the bathroom.

My mind working quickly, I realized that the man would probably have to come in here to retrieve his clothes and he would be stark naked if he did so. I felt my face burning red as if someone had poured a bottle of hot sauce on each cheek. Apparently, while overestimating my ability to eat, he had also underestimated my speed getting back. I dropped the bag of groceries on to the small table in the room and started to swiftly gather the articles of clothing so that I could toss them in to the bathroom. Shirt, pants, undershirt and briefs all gathered in my hands, I went to the bathroom door, which was thankfully ajar, and squatted down, intending to just throw them in unseen and then return to emptying the bag of food. I would have shut my eyes but I didn't want to earn Hank's wrath if I happened by accident to throw his clothing in a puddle or the toilet itself.

The problem was that I had never been all that great at _not_ looking. It seemed to be an impulsive act I had no control over. If I had been at Sodom and Gomorrah I would have been a pile of salt beside Lot's wife. It wouldn't have been intentional, just a reflexive act of conditioning. The fact that I could see something moving out of the corner of my eyes didn't help matters either. I raised my head instantly as I saw furious movement in front of me and I was lost.

Though the glass of the shower was frosted it was also fogged up quite a bit from the steam of the water, which was clearly hot, and from Hank's breath, which was also made warm from what he was in the process of doing. For what the man had planned once he had entered the shower, _cold_ water was not on his mind. I could see the outline of his mature and adult body fully as the water rained down incessantly on him from the shower head; it was the same body which had been beside me all night. The length of his torso, his strong shoulders and back, the slight swell of his stomach from the fast food I had often seen delivered to him and the mounts of his buttocks. My vision took in all of this but what my eyes inevitably lingered on was the sight of his hand violently working his cock. It was huge, fully erect and about the same shade as my face was while I stared at him masturbating. Was it part of his morning routine, I absently wondered? Wake up, take a shower, jack off, eat breakfast oogle the nubile girls that surrounded him at Jerry's Motel and generally behave like the troll hiding under the bridge for the rest of the day. Probably. Thinking of Hank playing with himself each morning while I had only been a few feet away from him excited me tremendously. Watching him playing with himself right in front of me, however, was bringing me to heated, full bodied sexual arousal. I felt my clit responding frantically between my squatting legs as my eyes longingly took in the sight of the motel manager's clenching palm traveling up and down his shaft. Noticing then that his other hand was squeezing the nice set of balls underneath his risen cock, my vagina gave an appreciative twitch. I wanted to kiss those same balls, to feel their fullness against my lips, while my hands wanted to take his penis in them and make the poor man not have to do all of the work himself. That my mouth would eventually make it to the head of his beautiful cock, I had little doubt. Nor that my hands would find their way to his ass, sooner or later.

" _Bad girl,_ " that always waiting bully inside of my head taunted. " _You're no better than Norman Bates spying on Marion Crane_."

No, I told it. There was no risk of me going and grabbing a knife; the only risk was that I would hop right in there with him and make a fool out of myself by making my fantasy a reality. Not wanting to risk it, I placed the clothes on the tiled floor and slid them closer to where the man was so enthusiastically jerking himself off that he wasn't even aware of my presence.

I was trying to avoid looking at Hank again, the image of his silhouette burned onto each of my retinas and my brain, when I saw something fall out from the pant pocket. It lay there dark blue against the tile of white and there was no question as to what it was:

A passport.

I was staring at it, my mouth falling open when I heard Hank starting to grunt and moan as his climax was fast approaching. Knowing that once the man ejaculated he'd be finished, other than wiping the come off, I fell backwards away from the door and on to my well paded backside. I swiftly scrambled to my feet ab6d started placing the food I had picked up onto the table. While I did it my mind was racing as to why Hank had a passport with him. Was it his own? Was it someone else's? I liked neither of these possibilities. One implied he had been planning on running and the other meant he was a thief. My hands were trembling when I set out the last item; my brain was too filled with worries regarding the passport while my body was still turned on by the sight of Hank pleasing himself.

The food was all on the small table, waiting for the man when he finally came out of the bathroom, his hair still mostly wet but his body thankfully clothed.

"You toss my clothes in there?" he accused as he sat down at the table.

"Yes."

He looked down at the food spread out before him and then gazed up at me, a mean and naughty glint in his dark eyes.

"See anything you'd rather _eat_ while you were sneaking a peek, Snowflake?" he asked, tauntingly.

I felt the heat down in my groin again along with the image of me wrapping my tongue around his glistening member and the passport was pushed to the back of my mind.

"Nothing that looked appetising," I lied.

Frowning, he turned and found his requested cigarettes waiting for him amongst his breakfast.

"Huh," he said, sounding astonished. "You picked up my favorites. Right brand and everything."

I smiled softly. "You think, as a writer, I could live all of those years close to you and not pick up on what type of cigarette you smoke, Hank?"

His eyes remained on my face and I started to turn red again as his eyes remained there for an unreasonably long time. He leaned forward across the table, his chest partly squishing a two pack of additives filled cupcakes. "Why, I think you have a crush on me, Erin," he stated.

"I think the water was too hot and your brain got fried," I returned as we stared at one another over junk food filled wrappers.

Something in my face, something of the fear I felt and the vulnerability, seemed to make him back away in that instance. I was an easy prey then, I knew. Oh, I always was but he had finally come close enough to seeing that I might actually be in love with him.

And he could have ripped my heart and pride to shreds for it if he wanted to in that moment. Instead he suddenly looked as scared as I felt and he leaned back against his chair as if I was a poisonous piece of cheese and he was a rat too wily to attempt to taste it.

We ate at bit in silence, before I announced that I was planning on heading over to Jerry's to see what was going on.

"You be careful, snowflake," he warned.

Seeing my opportunity to get back at the man for causing me my ealier fit of painful shyness, I retorted. "Why, I think you have a crush on me, Hank."

We were back to staring at one another over now empty wrappers and I thought the man was blushing. Filled with almost the same feeling that might have made him refrain from teasing me, I let my comment die a similar death.

As I was walking out the door, though, Hank called out, "I mean it, girl. I want you to come back here in one piece."

"I will," I promised. As I stood in the doorway, I wanted to add, "And you be here when I get back," remembering the passport that had fallen out of his pocket.

But I kept the words to myself as I started my journey back to Jerry's. Just as Hank kept the passport hidden secretly inside of his back pocket and I kept my love for him hidden not so safely inside of my heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay. So I like peeping on Keanu Reeves characters masturbating in the bathroom in this series since I did the same thing with John Constantine! So sue me!
> 
> On another note, I was thinking about how I enjoy Keanu when he's lighthearted in interviews and full of boyish enthusiasm and hyperactivity. At the same time, I also love those interviews where he seems pissed off, grumpy or morose, like he'd rather be anywhere else. This probably goes back to my love for cranky characters like Grumpy Bear & Dwarf, Grouchy Smurf and Porky Pine. Actually if you mix my two favorite Winnie the Pooh characters, Eeyore and Tigger, you might end up with Keanu. One is depressed while the other is exuberant. I liked both extremes. Still do. 
> 
> But, Keanu, if you ever need someone to help you bounce or who will help put your tail back on for you, I'd be happy to fill in the position until that real special someone comes along.
> 
> Or your Miz Ma'm'selle Hepzibah if you decide that I am that person, myself.


	6. What Lies Behind a Pristine Doorknob

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I return to Jerry's to find an unexpected discovery in room 214...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should have updated last week but I found myself quickly needing to work on two other entries in the series for both Canada Day and the 4th of July. Before that it was Father's Day. Hopefully this week will find me more on track! :D <3

All the way back to Jerry's, my mind was torn between two images: Hank masturbating in the shower and the passport which had fallen out of his pocket. One was extremely pleasant the other one not so much. Negative thoughts always seem to overpower the more positive ones (although there would have been quite a few girls at Jerry's who would have argued with me over how the sight of Hank playing with himself could be thought of as anything but horrid) so the blasted passport eventually won out the closer I became to my destination.

" _He won't be at the Sunset when you get back, Erin_ ," that inner voice was saying. " _He killed Carly Lynn and had his passport on him to get the Hell out of the country after_."

"Why would he bring a passport to what looked like it might have been a rape gone wrong?" I countered. "Men like Hank don't even let themselves believe that it is rape. They convince themselves that the girl wanted it."

" _Heh. Nice guy that you're lusting after_."

"Shut up," I told it but sighed immediately afterwards knowing it had a point this time.

Nearing Jerry's Motel, I expected to see cop cars, at least, if not a dozen swarming the place then one solitary and lonely little one waiting outside. I wasn't expecting for it to look exactly the same as the day before when I had gone out searching for a new place to live. Approaching its threshold, I was shocked to see no holstein or its law enforcing passengers anywhere outside of the motel's gates or on its insides either. My feet slowly re-entered the land of the seedy little motel known as Jerry's and discovered the place to be sitting under the California sky with its sins all safely hidden away from passerby's eyes like always. Tilting my head upwards to room 214, I saw no yellow tape blocking it off and announcing it to be a crime scene. It looked the same as every other morning; if I hadn't seen a dead girl lying on the other side of that door the night before I'd think that maybe a thirteen year old was just peacefully sleeping in behind it still.

All this stealthy creeping and careful peeping wasn't doing Hank or myself any favors I soon realized. If anything looked suspicious it was a big woman acting like a frightened cat after it had heard a firecracker, careening my neck to see what was hiding around corners and keeping my pace as lazy as a slug on Nyquil so I could opposingly speed my movements up to get out of there quickly if needed. But why would there be a need if I wasn't guilty in some way? If Carly Lynn's body hadn't been discovered yet, but somebody else was spying on me wandering about, they would no doubt inform the cops on my sorry ass and dubious behavior. With fear, I realized, if the young girl had no male DNA left from a sexual assault that I might be considered just as much of a suspect as Hank would be. The motive would be the oldest since Cain slaughtered his own brother.

" _Everybody knew she had the hots for Hank even though he treated her like shit,_ " I could hear one of the other runaways telling the police. " _But he would only look at you if you were under twenty, were gorgeous and weighed a hundred pounds or less_."

Climbing the stairs up to 214, I decided to adopt a more casual air even while my mind had found another interesting possiblity. It hadn't needed to be a man to take Carly Lynn's life from her. She was a thirteen year old child and just as long as she met up with someone bigger than her small little self, as most girls were at Jerry's, then she could easily have been overpowered. 

That didn't strike off sex from the list of possible motives though. Not all of the girls whom found their way to Jerry's and fell under Hank's leering gaze and too familiar touch were interested in men. And that sat just as well with the motel manager anyway, lesbianism playing heavily in the porn he frequently watched. I'd been forced to listen to it more than I had wanted to while living so close to him.

Trying to look as if I was just coming to say hi to a friend, I strolled up to Carly Lynn's door and knocked innocently.

"Carly Lynn?" I called out. "Are you in there?"

I knew the answer. Even if her body was, her soul had left the building and gone on home to glory. Probably why I received no answer back. About to open the door, my hand going to the knob, I saw that it was cleaner than it had been for months and certainly more so than last night; there was no blood or hair. Somebody had wiped it clean and, as I turned it and pushed the door open, I found myself not as completely shocked by the sight which lay waiting to greet me on the other side as I might have been. The lack of a presence of cops, the general mundaneness of Jerry's Motel's court and the pristine knob of the door still clutched in my hand had eased me into the fact that Carly Lynn's room might be missing the sad corpse gradually one step at a time like the stairway I had ascended to reach 214 itself.

The room was just about as immaculate as a room at Jerry's could ever be. Perhaps more so than most. No broken once alive doll lay on its bed and the sheets there had been changed. No way they could have salvaged the other ones; there weren't enough Tide pods in the world. I stepped fully into the room and shut the door behind me. In a daze, I walked towards the bed to have a better look, half expecting for there to be at least an imprint from the girl's body. There wasn't though. She had been so small that she had not possessed the weight to leave even that. I held myself and stifled a sob. It probably hadn't been too hard for her killer to take the body away. I wondered where she was lying now. A freezer? A place up in the hills to get eaten by the same wilcats where one had found its was to Jesse's room not too far back? Maybe poor Carly Lynn was already buried somewhere but I doubted the murderer would have had the time, not when they had done a good enough job on the murder sight to make Merry Maids jealous.

Remembering the sliver of wood I had found the night before, I quickly began to search the room to see where it had possibly come from. It was my only clue to a murder that looked to all the rest of the world that it had never even taken place at all. Bustling about, centering on anything that had once been a tree, I could find nothing which had been damaged to match. It was all the same furnishings, though, it seemed; nothing appeared to be any different. I checked the bathroom, flipping on the lights and thinking that Carly Lynn might be waiting inside of the tub to say hello with her wide and vacant eyes. All I found, though, was a bathroom which was slightly less clean than the motel room's main place of residence.

The last thing to check was the main door and I did that on my way out. It would have made sense if the sliver had come from it when the killer had broken in, only it hadn't. That had been Carly Lynn's main mistake probably, not to have deadbolted it. But when you spend most of your formative years in a bedroom inside of a house where locks raise suspicions and can't really protect you from a family member that wants at you and can have you in any other room in the house you forget that they even exist.

My one little clue didn't come from the door either and I shut it carefully behind me on my way out.

Outside, I walked over to Jesse's door and gave it a knock or two. "Jesse?" I called out.

Rapping again, I gave the girl five minutes before deciding either she was out or not prepared to answer it. Thinking about the expression on the model's face, as she had watched Hank and I running away, I thought it was probably just as well. She would probably only associate us with the sounds of the young girl's murder. She had probably heard it quite well if the screams had been loud enough to wake me up from my sleep a while away, I knew. There was the possiblity that she could be the real murderer as well. Although thinking of Jesse killing anyone, but maybe herself, was like picturing Bambi with a shotgun.

I was almost free of Jerry's altogether when right as I was passing by Hank's office the inner door creaked open and I turned to find Mikey standing there.

"Hey there, snowflake, you see Hank today?"

The thin man was staring at me with a blank expression on his scraggly face. Apparently he had taken to adopting his friend's nickname for me. But that was what lackeys like Mike did: they found a stronger ape to hang around and then stayed safely walking in their shadow and imitating them in the hope that one day they'd turn out to be just as powerful . Monkey see and monkey do, monkey can play just as big a jerk as you.

Now came another little excercise...how could I reply without incriminating Hank or myself later if the body _was_ discovered. "Why, should I have?" I asked, replying with a question seemed to be the wisest choice.

"No," Mikey snorted. "Hank don't waste his time with Canadian made _lard_."

It seemed the man had learned to imitate his master _too_ well.

"No lard isn't known to be one of our better exports," I commented wryly, leaving the man momentarily speechless.

Thinking of Mikey's weapon of choice I just as easily recalled the sliver inside my pocket. The only question was whether the baseball bat was made of aluminium or wood.

"Where were you last night?" I asked the man.

"Why, you get lonely?" he asked and made a kissy face in jest.

"I looked for management to help me with something. Hank was too busy smoking but when I tried the office you weren't in." It was a pointless lie that couldn't hurt one way or the other. Either he was in and thought me a bigger idiot than he already did or he would give something away about why he was missing.

"I was getting Hank and my's _refreshment_ ," Mikey said and finally held up his unseen hand to reveal what the bottom of the screen door had previously been hiding: a porn rag and a bag of weed.

"Well have yourself some fun till Hank comes back," I said, resuming my journey away from Jerry's.

Walking back under a morning sun which had formerly overseen me heading in the opposite direction, the realization that Hank could not _possibly_ have cleaned up room 214 since he had spent the night at the Sunset with me, flooded in relief over my frazzled brain.

" _Unless he called his little henchmen to clean up the mess_ ," the voice returned.

"When?" I started to ask it but knew the response...

He had done it before I'd caught him awake and sitting on the edge of the bed.

"Or he _had_ really gone to the bathroom like he claimed," I defended the motel manager.

" _Whatever you say, snowflake_."

"Shit," I mumbled to myself. The problem with being a writer (and another reason for the strength of my OCD) was you could always imagine a thousand different possibilities for any situation and find each one making sense if it was turned about in your mind this certain way or that and studied for long enough. It all came down to seeing butterflies or demons in a Rorshcach ink blot. Only hard evidence could help me out now and that was looking damned hard to come by.

Of course, if Hank _was_ gone when I returned to the Sunset that would be pretty well all the evidence my broken brain would need for both warring sides to convict him.

* * *

Back at the Sunset, I sped walk to my room and threw open the door.

"Hank!" I called seeing only our still unmade bed and no sleazy companion. "Hank?"

I checked the bathroom and found it similarly empty. I was starting to become worried when I turned around and saw Hank's familiar bulky frame filling the motel room's doorway. "Don't call my name so loudly; the neighbours will think we're having sex," he stated.

I couldn't help myself. I ran over to the sleazeball and threw my chubby arms around his own far from thin waist, wanting to cry. "You only wish, Hank," I stated. "It takes a girl 7 minutes and you look only good for about three."

My words were tougher than the shaking voice which said them and realizing this Hank wrapped his arms around me too. "Don't cry pretty, little thing," he soothed with a suprising amount of success. "It's okay."

I knew then that he would actually make a good father if he could separate his baser instincts from his more nobler ones. "Did you just use pretty and little in regards to me?" I sniffled.

"Yeah," he said, stroking my back and long curly hair which lay against it. "I blame it on too much Netflix. It's a bad influence, you know."

I laughed and held him tighter.

"What you so upset for anyway? Did the cops give you a hard time?"

"No there _were_ no cops," I answered into his shirt which smelled of beer, cigarettes and sweat. "There was no _body_. She was gone Hank."

The man in my arms had no reply to that. "Where were you anyway?" I asked.

"Outside smoking. As much as I would love to burn this dump down, I do have some respect for those in the business," he replied with a snort.

"There's hope for you yet, Hank," I commented and kissed his smelly old shirt, an act which made the hand rubbing my back stop for a second before it resumed.

As I held him tighter, I enjoyed the wonderful feeling of his presence and the hope of his innocence even as my hand brushed against the passport hidden once more safely in the back pocket of his jeans.


	7. One Door Shut Behind Me, One Door Opened and a Request Between

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hank and I return to Jerry's.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's funny but whenever I work on this I call it Jar. I also always try to put a Door somewhere in the title. Today I tried to find a connection between both words but couldn't find one until I remembered:
> 
> When is a door not a door?  
> When it's ajar.
> 
> Yeah. Stupid things like that amuse me.

We walked back to Jerry's together, Hank a few steps ahead of me while I was lagging woefully behind. Finding out that Carly Lynn's body had not only remained undiscovered but that it had disappeared on top of it all, seemed to lift a weight from off of the man's shoulders. His pace was once again self assured and fearless, the returning confident gait of a free man. I, on the other hand, felt as if my feet could barely rise from off of the pavement without great effort placed in the endeavor. They felt too heavy from the knowledge that the poor girl's body was hidden away somewhere and that she would never receive a proper burial or a place for those whom had loved her to visit and mourn.

To add to it, I kept seeing the rectangular shape which was Hank's passport through his shirt. The fact of why the man had brought it with him was still bothering me. I suddenly wanted to phone my older sister back in Canada for advice about it all but knew that was always a hit or miss affair. Sometimes we got along really well, while other times...

"Hey, snowflake! I know it must be hard moving all of that weight but try to keep up, will ya?"

I raised my eyes from off of the sidewalk to see Hank staring back at me several feet ahead. There was irritation on his face, and while his insulting nature was back in full swing, he had stopped to wait for me. In fact, I realized, he kept doing that whenever I fell too far behind. In a state of bemusement, I understood that after what he had gone through, the fear and horror of it all, he had started to maybe think of me as his puffy little life perserver. Even with his beginning to believe he'd escaped being accused of murder, I suspected that he still wanted me nearby, which only fed my already existent love for the man.

"So are we codependent now?" I asked when I had caught up to him.

"Codependent? What the Hell is that?" he asked, wilfully trying to slow his pace when we resumed walking.

"It's the term psychiatrists use for two people who have become unhealthily attatched to each other and can't function on their own," I educated him.

"Oh fuck," Hank exhaled. "Keep the psychology bullshit to the shrinks...that word doesn't apply to you anyway."

I bit my lip and shook my head. Any kindness or intimacy we may have fostered seemed to have evaporated verbally at least. "Don't worry, Hank," I stated. "I'm not one for psychobabble either. I was just trying to be funny."

"It _was_ funny," Hank defensively spat at me and then laughed. "Thinking I could ever get attatched to you."

"Well, who's walking by your side?" I asked in annoyance.

"Hunh...this? That's just what happens when you step on a piece of gum, snowflake," he muttered without looking at me. "It sticks and then you can't get the damn thing off of your fucking shoe, no matter _how_ hard you scrape."

I sighed again. As we continued walking, however, I noticed that the motel manager made sure that he no longer took too many steps ahead of me but seemed to be making sure that the piece of gum stayed safely stuck to the bottom of his shoe.

* * *

Walking back into his kingdom, which consisted of room after room of shitty wallpaper and blonde teenager after blonde teenager, Hank looked outwardly just about as happy and cocksure as I had ever seen him. Yet, I could see an edge to his actions which betrayed a certain anxiety and I also saw the way his eyes kept darting back to room 214, like he was afraid the door would suddenly fly open and pull him back into it, locking him away with the ghost of the girl we had both run away from the previous night.

"Hank, you're back," Mikey said exiting from the office and looking grateful.

"Now there's a real _intelligent_ observation," Hank threw back at him, ignoring how honestly relieved his only friend seemed at his return. "Yeah, I'm back."

Mikey's eyes darted to me with suspicion and minor disgust. "You with her?"

"No we just walked in together," the bearded man stated but I thought I saw his shoulders tense, while his voice seemed a little too forced. "You think I got no other options than that chunk of flesh? I spent all last night banging teenage triplets over at the Biltmore, for fuck's sake."

Mikey only nodded, well pleased. Apparently, whatever vicarious thrills the toady found in life, they did not include thoughts of his best friend fucking a solitary fat girl at the poorly Sunset.

"I'm going to go get my things to take to my new place," I stated flatly and walked away from both men. My purpose had been served and I didn't need to stand around and be insulted.

One of the hardest things to do, you will find, is walking away knowing that you're being watched without wanting to be. Your legs want to freeze up or simply turn to jelly, and not knowing which to choose, they alternate between both, making you feel like a monster from a B horror film from the fifties. It all just makes you horribly self conscious. Still, getting far away from Hank and his crony and returning to the safety of the room I was still in the process of abandoning, seemed like the best idea.

It was just the same as when I had left it. After a few seconds of looking at the back of any drawers for anything that might have fallen far back and turning my attention elsewhere, I was taken off guard when Hank burst into the room and shut the door quickly behind him. He glared at me, as I was on my hands and knees by the side of my bed, while, at the same time, he tried to keep his eyes averted from my ass.

"And what do you think you are doing?" he demanded in fury.

"I'm making sure I didn't leave anything behind underneath the bed," I said, rising to my feet. "I didn't."

"Not that," he said in a voice much softer, but with anger blazing at it's core, and I realized that he was intentionally keeping his voice low to avoid Mikey overhearing me in the office. "What do you think you're doing _leaving_ me?"

There it was again: the accusation that I wasn't leaving only Jerry's but him too.

I couldn't be sure but I thought his face blushed at his own words. With it being so red from all of his hissing it was difficult to tell. Still he blinked and looked down and immediately tried to correct himself. "Leaving me to sort this mess out by myself, is what I meant."

I gazed into his small, chocolate eyes and blinked once or twice myself. "I can help you, if you need me, just as well from the Sunset."

Hank's hand shot out and grabbed my wrist almost painfully. "You're staying here, Erin, right fucking here until we find out what happened to that body."

"Why?" I asked, shaking my hand free with more pain then his grabbing it had caused. "It seems like you don't have to worry about being arrested anymore. That's not your concern."

He studied my face with an intensity which made me frightened and excited all at once. Then again, that was how Hank always made me feel: terrified but exhilarated and attracted too. It was like seeing how close you could get to a Tornado and still manage to say you were alive and breathing. Even though the man usually stole my breath away whenever he was near.

"Oh is it, snowflake?" he asked. "Lolita's body didn't just get up and walk out of here on its own. And as long as her murderer is out there we both got ourselves a little problem."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning, I run this rat trap and about a dozen people could have seen me rushing away from the scene of the crime. Not alone, sister, but with _you_. Haven't you ever heard of the word blackmail, sweetheart? And that other one too: accomplice?"

I thought of Jesse watching from her window as Hank and I ran away together, as if the devil was chasing us and not the memory of a dead, little girl. My OCD was also going crazy with the new possible theory that Hank had still killed Carly Lynn and her missing body was now connected to one of the other runaways hope of blackmailing Hank for money, money he obviously _didn't_ have. Still, some of the girls were too young to exactly be wise and might have foolish dreams of hidden fortunes. Or maybe just free room and board without having to sell their bodies or to give them to the motel manager so he wouldn't toss them out. A return of the doubt I held over Hank's innocence far outweighed his threat of my being accused of being his co-hort in the crime. It was that latter, however, that seemed to make the man think he was somehow convincing me to stay.

"You wouldn't want that now, would do?" he asked. "All of your folks up in Canada thinking you'd helped a slimy prick of a motel manager off a little girl by keeping him safe after the deed was done?"

I shut my eyes quickly and grimaced because now the threat was finally sinking in. My dad and my mom were both dead. My sister was my main living relative, and while I loved her, she could also be horribly self righteous even if she never looked at her own self with as harsh and judgemental eyes. Thinking of her and anybody else I knew believing I had aided and abbetted Hank was the perfect ammo for him to use.

And then there was, Hank, himself, staring down at me, selfishly using my loved ones and feelings of fear and shame for his own welfare instead of my own well being. And I knew that I just as strongly wished to protect him, desperately praying to God that he was innocent, as I had done when I'd seen him puking outside of room 214.

All because I was still hopelessly in love with him.

"You didn't though, did you, Hank?" I whispered. "Please tell me that you didn't kill her?"

He looked wounded by my words. "You think I could do something like that, girl?" he asked.

I didn't know what to say. With the OCD voice inside of my head, it was hard to tell which thoughts and doubts were truly my own and which ones were only my mental disorder doing its ritual assault on my brain. Looking up at Hank, seeing his obvious pain regarding his perception of my doubt in him, I pushed the fucking OCD to the side and knew in my heart that I didn't truly believe he had murdered Carly Lynn. Maybe hurt her in a million other ways but never could I accept him having committed that one _last_ sin against her.

"No, I don't," I whispered.

"Good," Hank said placing his hands on his not very prominent hips and looking far more satiated.

"But Hank...you've got to tell me something," I stated, thinking of the one thing that was still unexplained to me, OCD or not, and which held my curiousity like a mountain lion with its jaws around the neck of its prey.

"What?" he asked, furrowing his brow, his relief replaced by the angry suspicions which always claimed his features sooner or later.

"Why did you have your passport with you?" I asked. "When I was throwing your clothes into the bathroom, I saw it fall out and..."

"On second thought maybe I don't _need_ your fucking help," the man snapped and there was a stronger mixture of pain and fear and fury inside of his eyes than when he had first burst in. "Go ahead. Get the fuck out of here! You can just haul your fat ass back on over to the Sunset and I'll take care of myself. Just like I always have."

"Hank wait!" I cried as the man stormed out of the door with a far greater rage than it had witnessed with his entry.

But he never looked back.

Running to the window, I watched him go to his office and disappear inside, slamming the door shut behind him. I heard the TV turned on and then the by now familiar sounds of a porn flick starting as he tried to get turned on also.

Tired and saddened, feeling as if I was usually just good at messing things up, I sat on the edge of the bed and cradled myself, rocking back and forth and trying not to think about how Hank was probably touching himself and watching girls far thinner and more glamourously gorgeous than I could ever be do the things I wanted to do to him.

I started to sing to myself as I did sometimes when I was sad, frightened or lonely. Any little tune that would help me feel better. Even just a low hum. Thinking of the motel manager solely wishing that I would stay to help him solve Carly Lynn's crime, I started to sing "Stay" by Frankie Valli. I thought I heard the volume on the television going down, so I started to sing in an even louder voice a new tune for my continual eavesdropper to overhear; this time it was Brenda Lee's old song "I'm Sorry." I was hoping that Hank would understand its meaning and was hoping it had worked until someone started to hit the wall with an object, scaring me enough to stop. I wondered whether or not it was a baseball bat and if it was, was it made of aluminum or wood?

But that was someone else's mystery to solve.

Slowly, I gathered a few more of my items, turned off the lights and started to leave Jerry's behind me once and for all. I wanted to find Carly's killer but I'd just been virtually evicted by the manager of her murder site and could not notify the police without hurting the man I loved. Leaving was my only option and if guilt came back to haunt me in the dead of night...well, it would have been worse if it involved wounding Hank even more than by simply asking about his passport.

If Jesse or the ghost of Carly Lynn were watching me go as I stepped towards the motel's entrance, I never found out because I refused to turn back. I wasn't going to anyway until I heard the door to the office opening and heard the sound of a cough behind the screen door, which remained closed. I turned to see Hank staring at me then. He seemed very much represented by the doors to his office then: one willing to open but not the other which stayed shut and was being used as nothing more than a shield between himself and me.

"Stay," the man said. "Just a _little_ bit longer."

I nodded at him from over my shoulder, my back still facing him as if it were my own shield. "I will," I replied.

He nodded then too before returning back inside his office to watch his porn. I saw Mikey standing to the side in the other room, a shining silver baseball bat in his hand, as he glared at us both.

Silently, I turned and walked back to my room, knowing that I wasn't only betting on finding Carly Lynn's killer. I was banking on Hank eventually opening the other door to his heart to me sometime too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to EdgelordinBlack, I learned about Keanu's new comic book series BRZRKR. Comic books helped me during my teenage years. Even though I am a straight, naturally born woman I loved them. And I'm looking forward to yours Keanu but...
> 
> You said, once again, about your love for Wolverine and how you wanted to play him...This might put a serious crimp in our imaginary romance inside of my head. My sister says I look like Rogue, not that debacle from the Bryan Singer films but the real Jim Lee, curly haired gal from the nineties. I am a dyed in wool Gambit/Rogue fan...
> 
> If I look like Rogue and you look like Wolverine...
> 
> At the same time, people wanted you to play Gambit for years...
> 
> I'm all confused.
> 
> But, anyway, I will be buying your comic book and I will pray for the day when maybe we can work on something together. Even if you're sitting there thinking you're Logan but I'm only seeing Remy Le Beau.
> 
> Ahhhh...who am I kidding. I'd only ever see ya as Keanu.


	8. Behind the Doors of Two Flown Birds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hank and I find a clue while going through Carly Lynn's possessions, which leads to the man making a date to investigate it together later on in his office...

I stayed in the hope of finding Carly Lynn's killer and I stayed in the hope that maybe one day Hank would open up to me.

But I wanted his love too.

There was really no point in keeping certain things secret between yourself and the workings of your own heart. Secrets surely had helped in getting Carly Lynn killed. Why she had run away from home seemed to be the most important one; it was certainly the best one to start off with and I found myself returning to her room the next day to try to see if I could find out the answer to it.

While the little girl's body was gone, I found the bag she had brought with her, when she had first checked in, hiding in the corner of the closet amongst the shadows, cobwebs and mouse turds. Bringing it out into the light, I jumped when I heard the door opening behind me. It was relieved to see that it was only Hank though. He creeped into the room, his eyes large and haunted, as if he expected to see Carly Lynn still lying on the bed like an oversized doll, no matter what I had told him about her body having been stolen.

"You find anything, snowflake?" he asked, eyeing the bag in my hands.

"This was hers," I replied. "I thought maybe if we found out a little more about her past we could see what had led to her future."

I brought the bag to the bed and Hank eventually came over to watch as I began to rifle through it, taking the few items out and laying them down on the bed. There wasn't a whole lot: A comb which still had some of her long strands of golden hair wrapped around its teeth, a small unicorn doll of the one seen in "Despicable Me" films and a few cosmetics and hair clips. The biggest piece of paydirt was a neon pink wallet. It had been stuffed down in the left side corner of the bag, as if she had wanted to keep it safe or hidden away even from herself.

I opened the thin flat wallet to find a few dollar bills inside, some Lisa Frank stickers and one lonely photograph. It was of Carly Lynn and her family. There was an older girl standing beside her and a woman, both of whom bore strong resemblences to the dead girl. A man was by her mother, in his early fifties, with blue eyes and a neatly kept gray beard. By his side had once stood a boy, one whom seemed to have been between the ages of Carly Lynn and her sister, but his face had been scratched out with a ballpoint pen.

"Who the hell is that?" Hank asked as if he believed I could answer the question for him.

"I just saw these people at the same time you did," I looked back over my shoulder. "If I possessed Mycroft Holmes' deduction skills, Hank, I wouldn't be standing here going through Carly Lynn's things, I'd be phoning the police tight now. Obviously, whomever he was, Carly didn't like him very much."

"Why?" Hank grumbled until I smirked, warning him he'd only receive my first reply back again if he expected an answer.

The motel manager suddenly grabbed the wallet out from my hands and dipped his chubby fingers into the department with the bills.

"Hey!" I exclaimed.

"She won't need it anymore," Hank remarked bluntly. "She doesn't have to pay either the worms or God where she's gone. Consider it rent money for her stay _here_."

I took a deep breath and exhaled. As I did, my breath struck a small folded piece of paper, which had fallen out as Hank had stolen about seven dollars worth of cash from the dead girl, and blew it further towards the middle of the bed. It landed closer to where the body had been lying. My hand faltered before grabbing it, scared and repulsed, even though the killer had done a very good job of cleaning up after himself.

I took the piece of paper and unfolded it, revealing some seemingly nonsensical words.

"A username and password," Hank commented, reading my mind.

"The question is where to?" I asked rhetorically.

The man's hand snatched the piece of paper out of my hand even faster than he had with Carly Lynn's cash. I made a grab for it, as he stuffed it in his pocket, only to cause Hank to look at me with a naughty little grin playing about his lips. "You going for the paper or something else, snowflake?"

I quickly retracted my arms and folded them. "Give it to me, Hank."

Okay. Not the greatest choice of words.

"Right here and now at a murder site? You are kinkier than I would have guessed."

I was turning red again from embarrassment, anger and arousal, my usual mixture of emotions whenever I was subjected to Hank.

"No, give me the piece of paper! I need to run it through Google!"

Hank shook his head and placed his hand on my shoulder. "I want to be there when you do, Erin. I'm busy today. Won't be until evening tonight when I get the chance. How about you drop by the office 'round nine and we look it up together. You can use my desktop...the one I keep the motel files on. It'll be easier than your cheapie little cell phone anyway."

My blush was definitely not going away any bit at the prospect of being in Hank's office that late.

"How about it, Watson?" he asked gazing down at me with twinkling, dark eyes.

I unfolded my arms and looked up at the man I had unfortunately fallen in love with. "How come _I_ have to be Watson?"

"I found the slip of paper with the clue. That makes me Sherlock," Hank declared proudly.

"You were stealing money at the time," I countered. "That makes you more like Moriarty or one of his henchmen."

"But I still found it," he grumbled. "So I'm fucking Sherlock Holmes. Now are you coming tonight or do I look it up myself?"

"All right," I conceded, starting to put the items back in the bag. I was too invested in the murder of the poor little girl and protecting Hank from being arrested also to argue with him. "Tonight around nine. What are you busy doing today anyway?" I asked.

A snort escaped the man's bearded lips. "Jerry's might be a dump to you, snowflake, but even dumps need looking after. I've got to go take care of some bills, renew some licenses and bribe or blackmail a few guys to look the other way in regards to a few health violations. Some of them use a few of the girls here from time to time."

"Oh Hank," I said in disgust, holding on to the unicorn doll.

"Save your judgement for what we find out tonight looking up Lolita online," he grunted. "Now let's get out of here. I can't stop seeing her big, scary eyes."

The man grabbed my wrist and dragged me out the door. I was still clutching the unicorn doll, not having been given enough time to place it back into the bag, when my eyes rested on the door to 212. "Hank, have you seen Jesse?"

"The wildcat?" he said as he stopped and looked confused.

Letting my hand go, he fished around inside of his pocket and took out his master key. Even after putting it in, however, the door refused to open and he swore. "Never can open this fucking thing!" he snapped. I walked towards it and placed my hand over Hank's on the knob, turning it gently. It moved and we both stared into the aspiring model's room expecting to find her dead body lying inside it, like we had with the other runaway.

The only sight which greeted us, though, was just another cheap room at Jerry's with bad wallpaper; just another one seemingly vacant even though it shouldn't have been.

"Jesse?" I called out, taking two steps inside.

"She's not here," Hank said. "Probably off getting her picture taken or finally letting her pretty boy boyfriend screw her. Maybe both at the same time."

"What if the killer got to her?" I voiced the possibility I feared. "Maybe he disposed of the body too?"

"Don't let your mind get carried away, lady writer," the motel manager chided. "More likely she hightailed it after hearing her neighbor screaming herself to death. And just _listening_ by the way. People are cowards. They like looking the other way."

I leaned against the door, studying the older man. "If they do, how come you aren't doing that this time, Hank?" I asked.

He studied me in turn and I clutched the unicorn closer to my large chest, breathing deeply and feeling its chubby horn resting between my breasts. That seemed to interest Hank a lot but he still managed to meet my eyes again as he replied, "Because I could end up in prison or bankrupt. That's my level of empathy, Erin. Just the same as Jesse's or anyone else"s. As high as it needs to be to take care of myself."

"But you rushed to Carly Lynn's room that night. You did that."

Looking away, Hank looked angry for one blinding second and I backed into the door and held the doll tighter in fear of his fury.

He looked at me with a less severe rage but with enough of it left for me to realize whom it was directed at, especially in conjunction with his next words. "Not soon enough though, huh? I sat there and listened for too long too."

"It wasn't your fault," I whispered.

Hank looked ahead again then to the floor beneath his feet and finally back at me. "Tell that to the woman in that photograph we both saw, Erin. Tell it to Carly Lynn's mother."

Hank gave me one more guilty glance and then started to walk away. I couldn't move. If I had needed any more proof of the man's innocence, it was the expression of self recrimination and hatred written all over his face. Suddenly I ran to the rail in time to see him reach the bottom step and the ground below. "Hank!" I called out. "Please! I'm tired of you walking away from me!"

Hank waved me away grumpily. "Don't worry, snowflake. Got things to do. Why don't you stay out of the sun and try not to melt while I'm gone? See you at nine so you can get to work."

I watched him storming away from Jerry's, almost bumping into Mikey in the process. "Watch where you're fucking well going, damnit!" he shouted at his friend.

The skinny man said nothing but stood and watched Hank leave before glancing up at me. "So you workin' for Hank now too?"

I swallowed and looked down at Mikey, whom was smiling and looking friendlier than I had ever seen him. "Yeah," I said, hugging the unicorn doll.

"That the gift he give you?" he asked, using a long thin finger to point at the plush.

I nodded, not wanting to say where it had really come from. The doll was very worn looking, as if Carly Lynn had often turned to it for comfort. I wondered briefly why Mikey would take it for a new gift. Apparently, it didn't speak much of Hank's gift giving skills.

Mikey smiled. "I got a gift when I first started working for him too. For security. I love me my present. What's your job?"

My mind raced. "Research on guests who run out and don't pay their bills."

I guessed it was true in a morbid way. My eyes went to Jesse's room and I wondered if she was on that list too.

"Cool," Mikey said before walking away.

* * *

Although it was bad of me, my mind kept trying to remember the words on the slip of paper Hank had placed into his pocket. My mind was itching to start to find out all it could on why Carly Lynn had scratched out the teenage boy's face from the photograph of her family. Was he her brother? Had he hurt her enough to drive her away? Mysteries and finding out information was always a weakness of mine. I loved peeling back the layers to find out why certain events had happened or, in contrast, loved that air of eerie, attractive discomfort I would feel when I didn't know the answer to something and it promised never to be found.

Hank was like that, I realized. The man was growing to be more of a mystery the longer I was in his company. How could someone so rotten show signs of a decent man being buried somewhere underneath the grime? When and why had he allowed himself to be the Hank known, mocked and feared by the runaways at Jerry's Motel?

He was another reason I wanted to remember Carly Lynn's username and password. If I did I could avoid being alone with him in his office. As much as the thought was exciting me, I was frightened too. The man could make me feel better or worse than anyone else on the planet. The thought of being invited into his private den and being close to him at night was scaring me as well. I wasn't completely sure of his motivations. While Hank being all Alpha male and likely to piss territorially on anything he deemed as his property was enough to suggest he'd demand to be present during an investigation into Carly Lynn's history, he could have just looked into it himself. I'd caught him often browsing what the internet's porn sites had to offer with great ease. His age didn't make him technologically inept. I couldn't believe he'd be lost checking out the info at Instagram, Gmail, Twitter or Facebook.

Still he had insisted on me being there which was peculiar.

"He's taking it like it's a date," I thought.

" _You're not pretty enough_ ," the OCD voice spat back. " _You saw Carly Lynn, Jesse, Samantha, Georgie and all the other girls Hank oggled. You're too fat and too old_."

"But he didn't want me to go," I stood up to it. "He confessed that twice...and I'm helping him out. I'm his friend."

"So is Mikey...that man worships Hank as some kind of god he can worship and live through. And Hank uses it. How is he using you? He's using you for..."

I smiled to myself then. My OCD had just messed up. I had nothing it could think of that Hank _would_ use me for, seeing in me nothing _worth_ wanting.

Getting offered a moment of peace to try to remember the letters on the piece of paper, I shook my head and eventually gave up. It was agnes something, no doubt in honor of "Despicable Me" once again, a movie Carly Lynn had probably watched often while growing up. But the rest was blocked from my mind. And the password, most of it had been numbers which I had never been good at remembering.

"Aughhhh!" I said in frustration as I sat on the edge of the bed.

It looked like I would be stuck visiting Hank at nine o'clock, after all.

* * *

The day passed slowly. I placed Carly Lynn's unicorn far back in a drawer of my room. Taking the poor dead girl's doll hadn't been the smartest move on my part, I realized. I could read the headlines and clickbait then inside of my mind, all gleefully proclaiming to have all the gory details about how a little girl had been murdered over a stuffed toy:

**CRAZY UNICORN LOVING NEIGHBOR SLAYS FELLOW MOTEL GUEST OVER A PLUSHIE!**

Or maybe they would still claim it was over Hank and that the unicorn had been the trophy I had taken with me to relive the crime. Problem with being in L.A. was that _anything_ went here, _anything_ could be accepted and believed; the most craziest and wild tale would be swallowed as fact. That was why the city had produced such a strange batch of pseudo religions and cults. I'd often thought it was linked to the large amount of writers, actors, producers and directors in Hollywood. The disease of make believe spread and infected anyone that attempted to make their living off of playing pretend.

At the back of the drawer, the beloved unicorn could also be kept safe incase the day came when it could be given back to Carly Lynn's mother and sister.

Realizing I had no change of clothing, another visit to the Sunset had been in order and, once there, I had pulled out a series of outfits I was most comfortable in along with the one I had chosen to wear to Hank's office when we researched Carly Lynn. 

I was standing in that one, hours later, as I knocked on the man's screen door, feeling odd in a lacy black top worn over an undershirt of white. The red skirt felt strange too, pants really being more within my comfort zone. But I had decided on the ensemble, there was no turning back; it was nine o'clock and I wasn't the type to be late from running off to change, irritating Hank by keeping him waiting. The thought that if I did it would only encourage him to watch some porn and begin to masturbate while he waited also did nothing to compel me in any way to leave the man's doorstep.

When the motel manager finally answered the door, I nearly had a heart attack, thinking surely that he'd take one look at me, laugh and ask "What did you think, snowflake? That this was some sort of date?"

Only Hank didn't laugh.

He looked at me kind of shyly while I looked at him in shock. He'd combed his hair back, trimmed his beard and put on a shirt, jacket and pair of trousers which weren't covered in stains and didn't look like he was heading off to meet a bookie. Hank...Hank looked like he could have been a movie star dressed like that.

I realized then that I _had_ been right before: Hank did take this as a date after all.

"Come in, Erin," he invited and moved out of the way to let me enter.

I blinked twice in rapid succession. I felt like an insect flying willingly into a spider's web as I entered the object of my affection's lair, not knowing which frightened me more: what Carly Lynn's password might reveal or what my time spent with Hank might lead to...


	9. Two Candles Burning Brightly Behind a Motel Office Door

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things get heated between Hank and myself, as we search online for information on Carly Lynn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wrote this during a tornado watch in my area. I hope it is okay. :/

I walked into Hank's sanctuary, passing him as I did, and knowing his eyes stayed fixed on me while I found the bravery to accept whatever the night had to offer me. I stood in the hallway, turning to see the man, whom was my first date ever, looking me over and apparently liking what he saw. His eyes were dark in the barely lit space but they glistened in apprecitation while they studied me in the style of dress he was not accustomed to seeing me in and which I was equally not accustomed to wearing.

"You look really pretty," he commented. "Really _beautiful_."

I smiled, half in joy and half in hysterics. Hearing Hank calling me pretty and beautiful was so odd after having suffered his insults for months. But it was how he truly felt; the truth of it was written in his eyes, shining like black pearls, and his mouth, upturned like a crescent moon lying on its back. But I still found it hard to believe that I was anywhere worthy of his admiring stare, not when he was standing there looking like he could have just stepped out of GQ magazine. I was almost dizzy from it all, Carly Lynn almost forgotten about entirely as the motel manager and I were shyly facing the fact that we had dressed up for each other.

"And you...you look like you should be in the movies, Hank," I commented.

His eyes no longer held admiration but a little bit of pain too, which caused my heart to experience it in sympathy. "You think? I came out here to be a star, you know. I was no better than the little twits who rent rooms here. But it didn't pan out. Glad I can still clean up well."

Images of Hank masturbating in the shower came flooding back at his words and a wave of heat rolled over my body like the waves on the Santa Monica beach. "You really do," I complimented and watched the man beam down at me in happiness.

"This way," Hank said leading me forward to a room which appeared to be his own living area. There was a king size bed, a table, a widescreen TV, a computer and desk and finally a table where two candles were glowing brightly by two plates. "I thought we'd eat first," he stated. "But I didn't dial the pizza in yet because I don't know what toppings you do or don't like."

I held back a giggle. You could dress him up but he still remained the old Hank underneath it all. It didn't matter; I felt like pizza anyway more than pasta or fish. "I like anything," I informed him. "Although that probably doesn't surprise you, _big_ girl that I am."

Hank looked a little embarrassed, probably clearly remembering the previous plethora of adjectives he had often used to describe me but only said, "Actually I like a girl who can eat. It bugs the shit outta me to spend money on a woman only to watch her not eat the damn thing. Or to know she's gonna go lean over a toilet bowl afterwards and throw it all up."

Brushing a strand of hair behind my ear, I wondered if Hank was revealing yet another part of his past to me to join his confession about having come to L.A. to be an actor. I had never seen him with a regular girlfriend and the girls he used at Jerry's were hit and run deals. He used them for sex and nothing else. His money was probably more often spent on hookers than meals for any woman he fancied. The man had to be referring to past relationships formed before he had become the Hank whom had first checked me into the motel he managed.

"I promise, I won't be doing that. And as far as pizza goes, anything goes, but I am partial to extra sauce and cheese."

"All dressed up like the both of us then?" my date asked, pulling out his cellphone.

"Yeah," I laughed. "That will work."

He smiled and nodded, ringing up the pizza parlour while I went over to the table and sat down by a lighted candle. Watching it dance as Hank ordered our meal, I wondered which was more dangerous: the dancing teardrop of fire before me or the gorgeous guy in a suit behind.

* * *

Swallowing the masticated bite of pizza in my mouth, I looked at Hank, washing his own down with a swig of beer and said, "You order up a mean pizza, Hank."

He laughed. "When you've been here as long as I have, you learn which places suck and which don't."

"How long have you been here anyway?" I asked, grabbing the can of Coke by my elbow.

I saw Hank's tongue move to the inside of his mouth corresponding with his cheek, making the skin outside project out, his eyes falling to the table and the already almost done pizza lying in the box. He seemed to be studying the grease spots left in the eaten slices absence, trying to remember the answer or maybe not completely wanting to. "Too long. Came out here when I was fresh out of high school. Originally I'm from Canada, just like you."

"Really?" I asked. "You never said."

"It was so long ago," he said with a shrug. "Days die, so does the past."

"It's still in there somewhere though," I said, sensing his sadness. "You ever think about going home again?"

His eyes met mine across the candles, which were continuing their own slow journey towards death. "What's the point. I'm not the same kid that left. I hate him. And there's nobody I particularly cared for up there. What about you, snowflake? You ever want to head back to that cloud you fell from in the Great White North? I get worried about you here."

His words were bitter and burnt with his own pain and the feelings of failure and disappointment the world of Hollywood and its false glamour had left him with. We were more alike than I had ever expected. Both of us had come from Canada and had our hopes vomited into the toilet bowl the city had, in the end, turned out to be for us.

"I love my sister but I'm afraid of what lecture will be waiting for me if I return with my dreams shattered in the same suitcase I left with."

"To broken dreams," Hank said, leaning across the table and holding up his beer can. "L.A. manufactures them by the thousands."

I leaned across the table with my can of Coke and hit it against the one in the manager's hand. The cans made a weird aluminium sound and the liquid left inside sloshed. We smiled at one another until the man's eyes dropped inevitably to my cleavage, suddenly presented to him. "They're nice," he commented. "Soft, pretty and big."

They heaved too while I sighed, knowing Hank didn't come with a self censor button. "Well, they aren't too pretty sans bra, let me tell you," I said, rising to my feet. "I don't know about those plastic girls you spend your time watching, Hank, but in real life the bigger they are the harder they fall."

I walked over to the computer. The night had been going well up to then but my breasts would always be an insecurity for me, especially knowing what sites the man had probably visited on the very same computer I was staring at. "We better start Googling Carly Lynn's information," I commented sadly, falling back to earth after my little taste of Heaven, with three complimentary slices of pizza.

Hank rose from his chair noisily and sat down in the computer chair to my side just as loudly. "Here," he said, spinning around to face me.

"What?"

"Sit in my lap. That way we'll both see everything together. I won't give you the paper unless you do."

It seemed like a ruse and I held myself then because my ass wanted nothing more than to park itself in the handsome man's lap. "Don't you think I might _hurt_ you?" I asked.

Hank seemed to soften at this, the affection he felt for me suddenly overpowering the mood having been spoiled over his leering at my breasts and my subsequent reaction. "No...you're fine. You won't hurt me."

Frowning, I slowly moved towards him and cautiously lowered my bottom on to his crotch. He grunted a bit in pleasure more than anything else and then spun the chair back towards the computer screen.

"You have the slip?" I asked, feeling my face turning red from the realization of what was underneath my bum.

"Yeah," Hank replied, grabbing it out from under the mousepad, on the left hand side, where he had apparently hidden it. "You want to handle the typing or should I?" he asked.

"I'll do it," I said, hoping it would get my mind off of Hank's dick and testicles even if I couldn't get the rest of my body to follow suit. "We'll try her handle at Google...see what pops up. Obviously the password won't help us at the big sites."

"How come?"

"Gmail, Facebook, Twitter all of those will recognize the device you are using. If it doesn't match up, they will stop you from logging in, unless you put in the verification code sent to your phone or email. Odds are, Carly Lynn, teen that she was, had her phone on her when she was murdered."

"Well maybe that could help us locate her body, at least" Hank theorized.

"You've got a point," I said. "Unless she's buried or in the freezer. We'll check that out afterwards. First let's see where we can go..."

Looking at the handle UniAgnes04, I knew I decidely was _not_ Sherlock or Mycroft Holmes; they had a chance of figuring that one out, whereas I had been clueless. Several sites popped up instantly and I moved the mouse to scroll down the listings looking for the best ones. Instagram and Twitter popped up and I went to them. "We can't sign in but we can browse for information, which is more important than being able to sign in to a site like AO3 up there, which is a fanfiction site, and not so much a personal one."

"What's fanfiction?" Hank inquired.

"Stories written by fans. People write fiction with the characters they like together or with themselves. They just usually label those as Reader or You fics."

Hank placed his head on my shoulder and I could see him smiling at me. "If I was a character, would you write a fanfic with me and yourself, snowflake?"

"Only if I was really pathetic," I commented but knew that I would.

"What rating would you give us?" he whispered into my ear.

"I'm trying to concentrate, Hank," I scolded, afraid to tell him we'd definitely get an E for explicit if I had my way, his breath nice on my earlobe. "We can talk dirty afterwards if you like."

"I _like_ ," the motel manager stated, giving my plump thigh a squeeze.

Not paying attention to how good his touch felt, I looked at the girl's Twitter and only found mainly retweets involving cute animals and what looked like herself in doggy and bunny ears. "Darn it," I said. "Everybody that tweets back to her sticks to their handles and she doesn't list a location. Probably trying to keep safe."

"It worked so _fucking_ well," Hank snickered sacrastically.

"I saw an Instagram back here," I said moving the cursor. "Let's try it."

Sure enough, it proved far more fruitful.

"Who the hell is Christina Shaw?" Hank said, reading the name listed for a girl we knew only as Carly Lynn's photo social media site.

"That must be her real name. Gotta give her credit she didn't use Smith."

"Yeah and now she won't be a Jane Doe either if we can locate her body." He glanced at the images and stated in recognition, "These are all from Apple Valley. She must have come from there."

I jolted when I saw one photograph featuring two familiar faces and one which probably would have been if it hadn't met up with an angry ball point pen. I clicked on it to see closer the picture of Christina and her sister smiling with a boy, a looker even though he had to have been in the age bracket between both girls, putting him at about fifteen. He had startling blue eyes, jet black hair and a smile so bright it probably gave off UV rays. Both girls looked happy as he sat between them, his arm around both of them. There was no caption to go with it only a series of hearts.

"He was fucking them both," Hank piped up.

"Hank!"

"No! I can tell!" Hank exclaimed. "Mark my words, snowflake, pretty boy was dipping his dick into two ponds from the same gene pool."

Shaking my head and exhaling, I looked down the rest of the photos that had loaded only to find an upload near the bottom that was the same one Christina had kept in her wallet. Hank read the caption out loud as he squinted over my shoulder. "My new dad, my mom, Evelyn and my new step-brother Randy. Then a stupid heart. Wonder why she listed old Randy last."

"Because she loved him," I whispered. "She wanted his name to be closest to the heart."

"That's a girl thing, isn't it?" Hank inquired, not impressed.

"And a grown woman's too if she loves the guy enough," I commented, feeling my own heart beating quickly for the man between me and the chair.

I saw that Evelyn Shaw had left a comment and clicked on her icon of a crying unicorn. The older sister of the murdered runaway had filled her page with images of emo items accompanied by printed pleas for her sister to return. She'd even posted a selfie of herself looking miserable in running mascara. It was hard to tell how much was genuine and how much was for show, however.

Hank grabbed the mouse from me roughly. "Hey!" I called out.

"Let's run her name with Apple Valley and see what turns up," he said.

Immediately several results were displayed which listed the disappearance of Christina Rebecca Shaw from her hometown of Apple Valley sometime after she had shown up at Jerry's. Hank chose one article and we both read it together. She had left her home before her gymnastics lessons and not been seen again. Her sister had been the last person to see her before her vanishing.

Well, the last person related to her in Apple Valley. The real person to last see Christina Shaw alive was still unknown and the reason why I was sitting in Hank's lap and trying to stay focused.

"I'm gonna try one thing," I stated regrabbing the technological rodent, finding the name of Christina's High School, which was Emerson High. I quickly found that the school had a highly respected gymnastics program, which had its own blog; one independently hosted. Grabbing the piece of paper, I typed in the information and successfully logged in.

"That's my girl!" Hank praised and hugged my round body as he kissed my cheek.

"Look there's a few messages in her inbox," I stated blushing.

Quickly, I opened the inbox to see that most of them came from a user called EveApp99. Clicking on the first one, I read it aloud.

**Are u here u brat? Come on! Don't pout C! R never shoulda been doin it wit u anyway! U're 2 young!**

The next one read:

**COME HOME!**

After that:

**Randy and I are both sorry! PLSE come back! Mom's crying all the time. So is Todd!**

The final one was just an emoji:

😢

"Told you," Hank said smugly. "He was boning both beauties. Probably the creep came here, found her and killed the girl so she wouldn't tell."

"It sounds like it was consensual," I argued. "What hurt Christina seems to be the fact that he was cheating on her with Evelyn, her own sister."

"Well he still coulda shown up here to kill her."

"A fifteen year old boy coming to L.A. and tracking down his step-sister that quickly?" I countered again.

"Fuck," Hank said, yanking my hand from the mouse again and returning to Googling stories about the youngest Shaw's disappearance.

The man happened upon a livestreamed interview with the family, shortly after Christina had run away. I think Hank was looking to see Randy for himself so he could reinforce the boy's guilt inside of his mind. All he saw was a deeply worried family, the two youngest members thereof, continually exchanging sad and guilty glances. "Look when it went viral, Hank," I pointed out, catching a glimpse of the listed information.

Leaning closer again towards the monitor, the man swore. The footage was shot in Apple Valley a few minutes after Christina had been murdered in a seedy motel called Jerry's, hundreds of miles away from her real home. Her family was innocent if the information was correct; their hope for the return of the girl they loved a miracle only Jesus Christ could offer.

"Well maybe it was one of the people at those gymnastic things she performed at," Hank said, grasping at straws the same way he had grasped at the mouse. "Pervs always go to those type of things."

"Oh Hank," I said in sorrow, knowing the man I loved had just lost one of his only chances to prove his innocence. I reached back and touched his cheek, the whiskers of his beard both soft and prickly against my palm, while I leaned back to rest my face on his other cheek.

Unexpectedly, Hank grabbed me on my hips before his left hand crept up my red skirt. "If I'm going to jail when her body shows up, whatever the hell she was called, I'd better damn well make use of every possible opportunity, snowflake."

I melted into his touch, his hand pushing aside the crotch to my panties, as our lips joined with a passion as heated as the two flames left to burn alone on the table.


	10. Still No Answer Behind the Door of a Missing Neon Demon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After our evening ends in a way neither Hank nor I wanted, I still find myself trying to help the motel manager prove his innocence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally got the chance to update. Not sure if anyone cares about the notes to this series, but that bump on my ear is supposedly fine. Doc says it's a wheal. Although if it doesn't clear up, I'm supposed to go get it looked at. But yay! I'm relieved! I was so worried about it yesterday! :D <3

The candles were burning, Hank's lips were on mine and his hands were exploring my body with an insistence brought about by desperation. Part of my brain was telling me that he was only using me because I was the closest female nearby while the other half was reminding me of all the little signs Hank had shown to me over the past few days that he genuinely cared and was interested in me. That it had taken the death of a runaway girl for him to finally show it made me feel guilty for my happiness.

But not enough to stop my growing arousal.

My panties pushed to the side, Hank's fingers found my folds easily and they dipped inside to play with my quickly swelling clit. The little piece of flesh responded to his touch with growing gratitude, blooming further and coming more alive than with my own occassional toying with it. I kissed him with more force, urged on by my physical need and my soul's own longing for the man. Hank's free hand began to roam towards my left breast, which he squeezed, finding the nipple through the fabric to rub gently between his fingers. I moaned and shifted on his lap, feeling hot and incredibly turned on.

As my buttocks and thighs moved against Hank's crotch, however, it felt just the same as before, the bulge still prominent but in no way hard or sharing the same excitation he was bringing to my body. I moved my ass against it, trying to give to my love's dormant cock the same pleasure he was bringing to me, and moaned as I felt it starting to show signs of life.

"On the bed," Hank stated, his voice thick.

He removed his hands from out of my panties and I saw them shining and wet in the candlelight from the cream that he had been calling out from my vagina by his touch. Bringing them to my hips, he half lifted me off of his lap and set me on the floor. Even though my body was still awaiting more pleasing caresses, there was something I caught in Hank's expression which bothered me. It was a look I was well familiar with from a life suffering OCD; he seemed more like he was battling unwanted thoughts now than being lost in the flash of lust I had seen when he had feared for his freedom. Concerned, I placed my hand on his shoulder and looked down at his face. When Hank looked up at me in return, I saw that same worried furrowed brow but then the look softened and his brown eyes gazed at me with something I knew was love. The candles created glints which danced in his eyes and a sad smile appeared on his lips. Then his eyes moved to the large swell of my breasts and the full curve of my rear and I saw a fresh burst of desire on his handsome face before he grabbed my right buttcheek and squeezed it.

"Get on the bed, snowflake," he ordered with more force.

I walked the short distance to it, still feeling where his fingers had digged into the buttocks. Glancing behind me, I saw Hank standing from the chair, his trousers a little more tented but not by much. Familiar insecurity went straight to my heart. Lying on my back on the bed, Hank instantly was between my legs, parting them so he could center his big frame with one on either side. Both his hands reached up my red skirt and I watched frightened and aroused once more as he pulled the white, plain pair of underwear off of me. Hank looked at them and I saw the same pensive expression return to his face.

"Is something wrong?" I asked.

"No...no...I just..." Hank threw them to the side, where they hit a nightstand by the bed and then lay on the floor.

My mind had started to race, feeling like the man wasn't telling me something, before his head disappeared up my skirt and all thoughts were pretty well blown out of my mind as he turned his mouth on me. I gasped feeling his tongue dipping into my slit and licking upwards towards where my bud had gone crazy once more and was waiting for him. It was quite the meeting between clit and Hank's tongue and I cried out louder in lust as the man deepened the introduction, bringing his lips into the action. I arched my back, my lover's big, strong hands, forcefully moving from my knees up to my thighs and pushing the skirt up so I could see his head pushed into my vulva, tasting me. Writhing and making small noises, tears fell from my eyes as the pressure built where Hank was attending to me. I had never known such pure sexual ecstasy before and was finding out that the motel manager's years of sexual experience gave him an edge above anything I could ever have suspected and was making me fall apart. I was becoming increasingly wet and Hank licked and suckled my clit, lapping up my cream at the same time. My legs separated more while I started to pump my hips, feeling the first signals of an orgasm happening.

"I'm...I'm..." I started to say but couldn't finish, being lost in my bliss as Hank knowingly stretched out his hands and grabbed my breasts, massaging the nipples through the fabric once again and pushing me into a violent climax.

The motel manager's face was still lost in me as I called out, the flesh surrounding him spasming as my cunt furiously clenched on nothing, another fresh spurt of fluid spilling out. When Hank finally lifted his head, I saw the stuff on his beard. He was smiling a little freely now, obviously proud he had made me come so hard. However, when he brought his fingers to my vaginal entrance his expression became suddenly serious again.

"You're a virgin?" he asked.

I looked at him and nodded.

"But...you're over twice the age of the girls that come here..."

Staring at him in shyly proud embarassment, I replied. "I was saving it for the right person: you."

At that perhaps too foolishly bold declaration, Hank resembled a frightened animal suddenly. He looked to the door near the candles, almost down to their holders now, and seemed as if he longed for escape. Not wanting him to go before I had given him some pleasure to, fearing I had wrecked the mood by the simple thin layer I had, I quickly sat up and brought my lips to his own boldly. My hand went to his fly and unzipped it. Reaching in for the penis, marveling at its soft smoothness, I felt that the man was nowhere near the state he would need to be in order to enter me. I was lowering my head, readying for my mouth to welcome his cock when he grabbed my shoulders and pushed me down on the bed before I could make contact. Confusion was my first emotion until Hank started to kiss me tenderly and the feeling was replaced by another wave of pleasure. His hands hungrily lifted my lace shirt and tank up to expose my bra, which similarly was pushed upward before I had time to protest. I watched as Hank stared at my bust with the same concentrating consternation on his face.

"Sorry," I apologized, close to tears, believing he was disappointed.

"No," the man said, taking hold of one and stroking it gently. "They're fine."

Pushing it up, Hank kissed the soft flesh and the nipple, making some of my fear evaporate.

At least for a time.

Hank's lips and fingers each roamed across my large chest in exploration, causing me wonderful and pleasing sensations. But though the man seemed undisturbed by the naturalness of my breasts, I still felt no erection bumping against either my leg or thigh and his movements were becoming desperate to try to coax one from his uncooperative cock. When my hands went to it to try to give it a few sensual strokes, he shouted at me in anger.

"NO!" he yelled, his face turning red.

I took hold of that same reddening face and peered into his eyes but Hank only avoided my gaze and started to kiss me, moving his groin frantically and trying to become aroused. I knew that the man was getting more and more angry by not being able to get an erection. Meanwhile, I was feeling more and more upset that I couldn't give him one. I was fat, ugly, and no longer young, the way Hank wanted his lovers to be. Our kisses and touches were becoming painful as more time passed and nothing happened. Finally in rageful frustration, the man set free a loud scream and brought his fist down on the pillow close to my head.

Tears were falling from my eyes and when Hank met them I only saw his anger grow. "GET OUT OF HERE!" he screamed at me, flecks of spittle landing on my cheek and blending in amongst the teardrops. Swallowing, I rolled out of the bed and ran to the door. Leaving an unfinished slice of pizza and my underwear behind.

* * *

The morning found me with a pounding headache and eyes that felt about as raw as I had really wanted to make Hank's penis after a night spent making love. Instead, I had failed in even making him, the landlord of sleaze and sex, get it up. I got up out of bed, brushed my teeth, washed my hair and got dressed in a state of half-life. Nothing felt worthwhile anymore, especially going through the motions of living a day knowing that Carly Lynn's murderer and body were still nowhere near to being found and Hank was likely to go to jail if the Shaw family traced their loved one to Jerry's Motel. All of the secret dreams I had held and which had been placed before me, Hank dressing up, the glimpses of humanity in his soul, our pizza date, our beginning to make love, had also been cruely torn away.

For the first time since I had moved to Los Angeles, I felt truly and utterly _hopeless_.

 _"See, you were just **there** ,"_ came my OCD voice. " _Any cunt would have done. Sorry, yours didn't at all, I guess. You should have known: you aren't his type, **snowflake**."_

I held my arm, walking over to the window to see if I could see the object of my affection on one of his smoke breaks. Surely, painfully enough, he was standing in the courtyard below, smoking a cigarette and staring up at my window. Our eyes met and locked for five seconds before Hank tossed away his cigarette and stormed back towards his office. I heard the screen door clanging into place, as the main one was slammed shut, but I remained frozen in place.

A minute later, I watched as a figure entered Jerry's Motel. It was Jesse's suitor, obviously making sure the manager was nowhere closeby before he started to walk towards his girlfriend's apartment. Immediately my feet came to life again and I rushed to the door, intending to speak to the virtual stranger. Although, my relationship with Hank was in question, I intended to still fight for his freedom, being convinced of his innocence and still desperately in love with him.

The young man was knocking on the door of 212 as I carefully and quietly walked towards him from my place on the ground. By the time, I climbed the stairs and reached him, I saw him trying to peek in through the closed curtains of room 214. A guilty expression was on his handsome face as he tried to see what was hidden away from his view.

"Can I help you?" I called out from the top of the stairs, making the man almost jump a foot in the air.

When his eyes found me, he looked at me with a friendly, bashful grin. "I was looking for Jesse."

"She's in the room over," I stated.

"I know," he replied a little too quickly and with too much defense in his tone. "When nobody answered, I thought I'd try her neighbour."

Perhaps it was his wording and the remembrance of Hank's words to him days before, but Dean's cheeks seemed to lose their color and his eyes widened.

 _"Or maybe, he was remembering having murdered her and he's real bad at telling lies,"_ I thought to myself. If Jesse had heard her boyfriend murdering Carly Lynn, it would have given her double reason to abandon her room at Jerry's so abruptly. Having the killer know your whereabouts was never a wise or safe idea.

"I doubt Carly Lynn knows where she is," I said, folding my arms.

"Carly Lynn is her name?" the man asked, glancing at the door of 214.

 _"Room Two-Fourteen! Gotta be seen!"_ I heard Hank shouting out in my mind and I had to tried not to shiver.

"Yes and she's too young for you," I snapped, all mother hen for the poor dead girl. "So is Jesse for that matter."

"We're just friends," he stated coldly. "If you want to report anybody report that pile of slime down in the manager's office."

My heart broke, both from Hank being brought to my mind again and the fact that Jesse's friend was right. I was a hypocrite to be standing there accusing a stranger of making eyes at young girls when Hank had written the handbook on it. A heart could be the worst accomplice there was if you'd given it to a man you couldn't trust. Sighing, I unfolded my arms. "I'm worried about Jesse too," I stated. "She hasn't been around."

The man looked extremely worried as he reached into his pocket and handed me a card. It contained his name, the address of his photography studio, his phone number and email address. "If you hear from her let me know," the photographer named Dean said. "Some weird stuff has been happening. Jesse was terrified out of her mind of that guy downstairs...I hope he didn't do anything."

"I _know_ he didn't," I replied. "But I'll call you if anything turns up."

"Thanks," Dean said, patting me on my chubby upper arm and giving me a worried but winning smile as he passed by and headed down the stairs.

I watched his exit, just as I had watched his entrance. While Hank hadn't seen that, my eyes darted to his door to find him staring at Dean walking away now. The manager then turned back to spot me standing by room 214. I held up the calling card, a Watson hoping to call her Sherlock out to join her. Instead all the erstwhile Holmes did was glare at me strangely and then return back to his office.

* * *

I did a little research on Dean back inside my motel room. Nothing of interest showed up, other than a handful of mixed reviews for his skill as a photographer. Some people thought he was a fairly decent one, while others thought he'd forever be just another wannabe shooting mediocre photos of all the lost angels whom had come to Hollywood to make it big.

Mostly everybody reported him as being decent though. No complaints of sexual misconduct or any other inappropriate behavior.

In my lonely little room, I ate a tin of tuna, had some crackers and missed Jerry's Motel's manager's good taste in pizza. I feared how he'd handle what they would serve him in prison, knowing it wouldn't come close to the food he enjoyed on the outside. Seeing no reason why I shouldn't go and tell the man that I was still going to do my best to prove his innocence, I rushed to the door only to find Hank standing outside about to knock. We stared at each other in silence and embarrassment until concern overrode my own shy feelings. His face looked older than I had ever seen it before. Not even after discovering Carly Lynn had he seemed so frightened and old.

"Hank, are you okay?" I asked.

"Snowflake, we gotta talk," he simply replied. He started to step into the room, stopped and stood there running a hand through his thick, dark hair, looking up at me with haunted eyes. "Can I come in?"

"Yes, please," I said, stepping out of his way and in partial shock that the Hank I knew had actually asked for an invitation.

"Thanks," he mumbled.

As he walked past me, I saw his passport still wedged into his pants pocket and I was grateful he hadn't used it to leave the country yet. Although, if we couldn't clear him, I was on the verge of half suggesting it myself. I closed the door and passed him in turn, walking to sit at the end of my bed, where I waited patiently for him to initiate a conversation which would hopefully soothe him in some way. Rushing him into it was a bad idea, I understood. Whatever Hank felt the need to tell me was important and I knew that he needed to find the strength in his own time. Pressuring him into it would not help.

"I can't believe I screwed things up so badly last night," he said after a loud swallow and about sixty seconds worth of silence. "I had it all planned out inside of my stupid, fucking brain but I loused it up like everything in my fucked up life. I am so sorry."

An apology from Hank was a rarity. I enjoyed it for a moment before replying with what I thought was the agonizing truth I had been trying to forget about all day. "No," I said. "It wasn't your fault...it was mine. You freaked out when we found no new leads about Carly Lynn. You tried to forget about it the best way you knew how. Take it easy on yourself, Hank. I'm not sexy. I love you but you don't love me. I spent months here thinking that maybe...but you can't and I have to face that."

Hank looked at me in complete irritation and bafflement. When I continued to return his gaze with my own confusion, he became less annoyed. "You don't get it do you? Why am I surprised...how fucking well _could_ you?"

"Get what?" I asked.

Hank exhaled sharply, his small eyes ablaze with fear as he stared into my eyes with none of the same hatred he obviously reserved for himself. "Erin, I _am_ in love with you," he confessed sadly. "That's why I can't _make_ love to you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear Keanu;
> 
> I heard that Refn had you watch "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" before working on the film. What was your favorite song? "Sweet Talkin Candyman" is mine. 
> 
> Much love,  
> Erin  
> XO XO  
> :D <3


	11. In the Doorway, an Answer Lying Behind the Question

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hank tells me the trauma of his past, while, days later, I make a startling discovery which might cost me my life...

My brain really didn't know how to handle the confession at first. There was the familiar leaping of the heart which always accompanied something which had managed to touch it, as if an unexpected emotion was its own defibrillator. Hank had just told me that he was in love with me. It was what I had dreamt about for months now. The man I had foolishly fallen in love with had fallen in love with me too. I felt relieved and incredibly happy. However, confusion accompanied my joy, marring it until it rushed successfully to the forefront. Hank loved me but could not _make_ love to me. The revelation was frustrating. Perhaps, what made it even worse was the look of absolute dread in the hotel manager's eyes. Being empathetic, I soon found my feelings mirrored his fright. While, at the same time, I desperately wished to save him from it.

All I found myself able to do, though, was stare up at him and repeat what he had just told me. "You're in _love_ with me?"

Hank nodded, his hands resting on his almost nonexistent hips. "About a month after you came here. No. About two minutes after you checked in. Why do you think I moved you? I wanted you as nearby as I could get you."

I ran a hand through my hair and looked at the ground to his side. "But...you never stopped insulting me," I said in a voice slightly higher than a whisper, meeting his eyes once more. "Everytime we saw each other, you..."

Hank was shaking his head, clearly infuriated at himself, and then interrupted me with a typically blunt snap, "I know, I was a real asshole but you frightened the shit out of me."

"I...I don't understand," I said. "You never looked at me...you were always looking at the other girls here."

Remembering months spent having to watch Hank ogle young women and often visiting some of them in the rooms he let them rent for free, the pain came back and the jealousy which had accompanied it all. Starting to cry, I comforted myself now with the knowledge that Hank loved me and not them, making the tears an odd mixture of sorrow and pleasure.

Hank being Hank, however, the man only took them as belonging to the former emotion. I watched through eyes, that looked like a windshield being beseiged by rain, as he squated his hulking frame down beside me and shyly held my head. "I am gonna tell you a few things, Erin Smyth, that I have never found the strength to tell another living person...but maybe when you hear them, you'll understand what went wrong the other night...and how it wasn't your fault. Maybe you'll understand me a bit better too."

Seeing the man's pain more closely now, his dark eyes filling with his own unshed tears, I reached across and touched his cheek. "You don't have to Hank," I reassurred him.

He held my gaze and I saw a certain courage and resolve enter his eyes then too. "No, I need to. It's been inside of me for too long. It all becomes like a poison if you don't let it out. Until you become someone like me."

Abruptly Hank rose to his feet, stepping a few feet away, his back turned towards me. The man's hands went to his back pocket and found the passport lodged inside one of them; he ripped it out forcefully as if he suddenly loathed it. Stomping back towards the bed where I sat, he threw the item down beside me. "I guess, it all started with that stupid thing: the dreams it let me foolishly chase."

I picked the passport up but would not open it, my eyes remaining on Hank as he began to tell me the whole story he had left out from the night before about his coming to L.A.

"I grew up in Canada...just like I said. But I came out here to make it big just like any of the girls that come to stay at Jerry's. Years spent in high school plays, everybody telling me I was handsome enough to be a movie star..." Hank laughed bitterly, looking off and deeply within old memories. When he returned his attention to me the fear had returned full force. I knew that he was dreading telling me what he was about to and I nodded at him in encouragement, agreeing with him now in the assessment that the poison was better out than in.

"The producers thought so too. You find yourself doing things on the promise that it will open doors for you. It took me ages to even agree to it...At that point, I had a girlfriend...name was Sheila. Well we were close to starving and close to getting kicked out of our own little hotel room...a lot worse than this one here.

"So I let myself be used on the promise of a lead role but all I got was bit parts. And I started hating myself for what I let them do to me...." Hank's voice became strained. "I couldn't tell Sheila about how I was managing to pay the rent or put food on the table. And I'd spend hours trying to wash myself clean. Then I started to look at other women and that made me feel a whole lot cleaner than a lot of hot water and soap."

Tears were falling from my eyes again as I shared Hank's humiliation at what he was confessing to me, his essential act of prostitution. When he saw them, initially, his pride was riled at my pity. But when he saw clearly the love underneath it all he softened in gratitude.

"I'd be fucked and then I'd go and fuck some pretty young thing hanging around the studio to wipe it from my mind so I could go home to Sheila and smile. There was never any shortage of girls around. Just the same as me: ready to be used and abused. Fucking them...well it was therapy for the both of us. But I was having trouble making love to Sheila...guilt and shame. Only one day she found out about the other women and left me. I loved her, Erin...I hadn't treated her right, but I loved her. I got drunk, went to the studio and beat the shit out of one of the producers there. Got banned for it too."

I heard a loud swallow work its way down the man's throat. He ran a hand through his dark hair in anxiety. "I kept looking at my passport, thinking that I could always go home again but I knew I couldn't. I'd always know what had happened, that I wasn't the same fool that came to Hollywood to be a star. Still I took to keeping it on me...just incase, you know? Old habits die hard, I guess."

Hank smiled at me with cynical sadness. I was still crying when I gently urged him to keep talking. "Go on," I said tenderly.

"Well by that stage I was used to selling myself. L.A.'s full of demons with fat wallets. So, I did that to survive for a while. And there were always young girls there willing to help me forget afterwards. I was finding myself needing to make them do more and more demeaning things just to lose myself in some sexual fantasy. Any decent woman I was with stopped doing it for me. I couldn't get hard with good girls. They weren't the bad girls that helped me to forget, the ones I could shoot all my shame off into and make feel as bad as I was feeling."

There was silence while Hank studied my face. "I'm a good girl," I stated. "That's why you couldn't make love to me."

"You're sweet, Erin," Hank said. "But I trained my body not to go for sweet sex a long time ago, long before I knew you. I thought that maybe with you it would be different. But I don't know how to get free from the trap I made."

"Conditioning," I stated. "You conditioned yourself...it's like my stupid OCD triggers."

Hank frowned. "Yeah. Right."

"How'd you come to work at Jerry's?" I asked, genuinely curious.

Hank laughed with more amusement than bitterness this time. "I eventually came across some Jesus freak. He took it upon himself to save me. Put me up in this fucking rundown place and let me run it to keep me off of the streets and away from the 'sodomites' as he called them. Gave me a generous salary. Only problem is it also gave me free reign to let whomever I wanted to stay here. And that was whatever runaway stumbled in under the entance sign. Neon...they're drawn like moths to it and I'm the fire that burns them.

"I hated them and their stupidity. Guess, I saw a lot of myself in them. So I used them, Erin. Just like I was used. I got older, they stayed young and soon I became Hank the pervy manager. And that was fine for a while. I had me a choice of attractive playthings and a fawning sidekick whom idolized me for it. Good for the ego and perfect for forgetting what I had let happen to a naive boy from Canada."

Hank was gazing at me in full regret and agony and several other emotions that he usually kept under lock and key, like an unlet room at the motel he managed. "Then one day a little snowflake drifts on in from up north and she has the nerve to land at my checkout desk and make me fall in love with her because she's got pretty, soulful eyes and is still innocent enough to give a damn, no matter what the city does to her. And then a runaway goes and gets herself murdered, making me have to be around the woman more than I had ever planned on being."

In a few strides, Hank made it to my place on the bed and knelt before me, taking one of my hands in his own. He stared up into my face lovingly and I stroked his hair with the same emotion. "But I can't make love to you, Erin. I stopped being able to do that to a girl I saw as being human years ago. Sex is all about objects to me. I don't want you to become either one of those _or_ the fantasies I use to help get me off. I love you too much for that."

He squeezed my hand tighter, the human monster known as Hank. I saw clearly then what had made him the way he was and the secret rage he had let consume him and control his lust. Hank trusted me enough to show me what had created him. Dark eyes met mine in defeat. "You've been waiting for the right person...I am never going to be the right person," he stated.

I cupped his bearded cheek in my hand and smiled. "That's all you've ever been, Hank," I soothed. "You _are_ the person I have been waiting for all this time. Your snowflake loved you the moment it drifted into Jerry's too. And I've waited this long; you think I can't wait any longer?"

His eyes gleamed with bittersweet hope, while my head leaned forward to place my lips softly against his.

"Erin...I," he started to say but I stopped his words with another kiss, one that made him kiss me with a far greater boldness.

Afterwards, I smiled and pulled him on to the bed with me. He knelt on it reluctantly, looking like some big old bear that was about to be eaten by the plump bunny rabbit crawling onto the bed and towards the pillows. "Lie down beside me," I urged patting the lumpy mattress.

"I can't, Erin," he argued.

"Did I say I was going to _make_ you?" I asked. "I just want to fall asleep next to you...and wake up beside you too. At least one more time, before we find Carly Lynn's killer or we fly off together."

Holding out my hand to him, Hank took it and he fell down next to me and into my arms. "Would you really do that with me? Fly away?"

"Yes," I said, bestowing another kiss from my truthful lips to his trembling ones.

* * *

We slept together that night and the next two ones as well. Hank and I kissed and held on to each other but sex did not enter into it at all, despite those kisses and a few innocent strokes. In my head, I thought it best to show the man once again that love was not reliant on having outright sex. It was in small touches and an intimacy born of trust and caring. I wanted him to know that I loved him and did not care that the only love he could offer me was the type existing in his heart rather than his groin. I saw him relaxing incredibly and we spent the evenings mostly just talking. Most of it revolved around things that did not concern the murder of the girl in room 214. That was saved for our discussions during the daytime, ones which were turning more and more into conversations over where we would flee to.

"I've been here so long," Hank confessed one day, sitting at the small table in my room while I stood beside him, looking at an old worn map. "I'm not sure I could leave it."

"Even though you could go to jail?" I asked in shock.

Hank inhaled sharply. "Yeah. Erin, this hotel came to represent safety to me. And I have my responsibilities too..."

"Okay, Jack Torrance," I teased. My thoughts turned once more to trying to find Carly Lynn's killer and I remembered something we had forgotten about entirely after our failed attempt at sex. "Hank, we really should try the password trick we were going to. You know, where I try signing into her Facebook or Gmail and they'll send a call to her phone?"

"Think it will work?"

I shrugged. "Right now we are running out of options. If she was hidden away with her cell or if the murderer has it and we're in range to hear it, it might. Is the password still in your room? You can try to have it sent while I wander around Jerry's keeping my ears open."

The motel manager pulled me on to his lap, shaking his head in refusal of the scheme. "No. I want you safe in my office when we try this, snowflake."

It was evident from the look in Hank's eyes how much he adored me. I thought to myself how much of a shame it was that his acting career had never taken off because he had managed to hide that fact away from me for so long. "Well, I don't want anything happening to you either," I commented, running my index finger behind his ear. "I enjoy waking up to you, Hank."

"I'll be fine," he replied, looking very happy. "I went out and got a gun shortly after the girl died."

I frowned but it turned into a bemused smile. Guns weren't my thing but in this case one could prove useful.

* * *

"Where do we start, Watson?" Hank asked me in the courtyard.

I placed my hands on my hips and stared up at him in astonishment. "Sherlock's taking orders now?"

He patted my ass. "Yeah. He's hanging up the deerskin and pipe."

Laughing, I pointed to room 214. "Well start with the murder site. Just incase the killer discarded it somewhere we didn't look. It's also close enough to Jesse's room. The walls here are too thin."

Hank began to walk towards the stairs, following slapping my butt more forcefully, while I turned to go towards his office. I was just opening the screen door when Mikey's face appeared. "You lookin' to do more work for Hank?" the man asked. "Cause he ain't been in for days. Must be on a bender with a couplea blondes up in the hills again."

"That's fine," I smiled politely. "I just need to get into his room. He left something for me to check on the computer."

"You good with computers?" Mikey smiled in an mildly unnerving kind of manner.

"I get by," I said before the man opened the door and let me get by him too.

I squeezed my body past him and Mikey snorted, "You sure are fat."

My eyes blinked rapidly from the insult but I tried to ignore it, focusing on the memory of Hank's arms around me and his lips locked with mine as a shield.

"You still got that unicorn?" Mikey asked suddenly. "The one just as stuffed as you?"

"Yes," I replied.

"You wanta see what Hank gave to me?"

"Sure," I replied, just wanting to get to the bedroom and the password so Hank and I could start our search for the phone.

Mikey went off in one direction while I walked in the opposite one, towards where the paper lay hopefully somewhere near the computer. On my way to the chair, I absently noticed my underwear still lying by the nightstand. Hank must have been too upset to have done anything with it, I thought, before turning my gaze back to the computer desk. I saw the piece of paper lying on the floor, grabbed it and threw my ass into the chair, missing Hank's lap being there this time. I decided on Carly Lynn's Facebook account and started the process of password verification, choosing the verify by phone option.

Footsteps approaching while I sat patiently in the chair, wondering if Hank had heard anything, it took me a second to register that music had begun to suddenly play in the hotel manager's bedroom.

The tune was Pharrell William's "Happy" from the "Despicable Me" sequel.

Slowly, my heart ceasing its beating, I turned in the chair to find Mikey standing behind me in the doorway. He was staring down at a ringing phone in one hand while in the other he held a beaten old wooden baseball bat.

One missing a large chunk from its blood stained tip...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just one chapter left...
> 
> Dear Keanu;
> 
> Excited about your BRZRKR message on Friday. And curious about that super crazy plot turn...
> 
> Much love,  
> Erin  
> XO XO  
> :D <3


	12. Behind a Closed Bus Door

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mikey loses his cool, I lose my virginity and Hank loses his job.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this wasn't posted yesterday! I was working on it and over at the BRZRKR Kickstarter page! It was a virtual celebration and so much of a joy to see the videos, countdown and people posting. 
> 
> Since this is the final chapter here, I knew I shouldn't rush it to post it. Besides, I am sad to see it end. Well, to stop telling the tale I should say. There are no real endings.
> 
> I hope you will enjoy!

I didn't so much see my life pass before my eyes as the last few days of it. The images began, like a roll of film being run through an old time projector, with my overhearing Hank's crude comment about Carly Lynn and found their ending in the situation I was currently trapped inside: knowing Mikey had been the young runaway's killer. The man was either slightly higher than a starfish on the intelligence qoutient level or he was stark raving mad because he had voluntarily brought the murder weapon used to show off to me while it still bore the poor girl's blood all over its wooden surface.

The dominating presence in the recollection of a mystery, between the question and the answer, was Hank. Just as he lorded over Jerry's, he held his place at the center of my memories and heart. I saw him there in all his moments of abrasiveness and suprising warmth and wanted to see him again, coveting additional memories to place lovingly amongst the rest; it was the only thing that was giving me the strength to not lose my head and react in absolute terror at the sight of Mikey and his weapon of choice.

Trying to stop my trembling, I hid the phone in my lap. If I ended the call, the man might put two and two together and realize I had discovered the truth. It was better to let it ring and act as if the two incidents were unrelated. With further relief, I saw the man hit the mute button on the phone that was not his and end Pharrell William's happiness.

"Always getting girls calling me up. Just like Hank. Him and me...we're like pussy magnets," Mikey said and raised his scraggly face to grin at me proudly.

I smiled back as convincingly as I could manage.

He stepped into the room holding up the baseball bat with even more pride. "This was the first gift Hank ever gave to me. Said it was to beat the scum of L.A. away incase they came knocking on the door. He told me he used it to beat the girls away. Told me I could do the same."

 _"Not literally Mikey,"_ I wanted to tell him but wisely bit my tongue.

"Hank...he knows how to get 'em...wish I could be like him..." he contradicted his previous statement with sad envy.

"How long have you known Hank?" I asked casually, putting the phone back in my pocket and trying to head for the door slowly, as if I'd finished doing all that was needed.

"Over a decade now...sometimes I get Hank's leftovers..." I stopped in my tracks and Mikey added, "But I make 'em not tell him...by the time I'm through with them they don't wanna tell _anybody_."

I offered the man another smile despite the queasiness I felt making me almost physically sick.

"Don't know who he's fucking now," he stated in remorse. " _Must_ be those same girls up in the Hills...but I don't get it...why not these ones here? They're only runaways, after all. Any number of 'em can disappear and ain't nobody who will give a fuck. Hell, even Hank don't notice much when one of them goes away. And he's got that bed there. They're only whores; they don't deserve much..."

Mikey turned to look at the bed and as I slid closer towards the door, my thoughts racing with the question of whether it was _only_ Carly Lynn's blood on the bat, I noticed his head lower as something caught his interest on the floor. I tried to use the distraction to escape but jumped back when the blood bat suddenly appeared between me and the doorway, blocking the only way out. Closer now than before, I could view the bat more closely. I saw clearly the empty space where the chip I had safely stashed away in the drawer in my room would fit. I also saw enough spatterings of blood to indicate that Carly Lynn was not the only runaway whom had never been given the chance to check out of Jerry's while she was still breathing.

Calming myself, I turned to look at the murderer. My underwear was dangling from Mikey's fingers, looking very large and white, and he was looking at them and then at me with a suprisingly frightening look of repulsion, confusion and anger. "What the hell is _this_?"

"Underwear," I whispered.

"I know that they're underwear. Are they _yours_?"

"No..." I lied, hoping it would allow me to leave.

"WELL WHO THE HELL'S ARE THEY THEN?" he screamed so loudly, his mouth opened wide enough that I could almost see clear down his red and blister filled throat. "No, no, no," he suddenly changed his demeanor, shaking his head, trying to convince himself that what his mind was telling him had to be wrong. "Hank would never go for a fatty...Hank's got _eyes_...Hank's like _me_...I'm _like_ Hank...I _AM_ Hank. And you ain't nothing but a big old tub of lard..."

Normally I would have been wounded by the insults more but, right at that moment, my urge for surviving overrode my sensitivity. Still, I could not play pretend that the underwear was not mine. There was an unknown bit of pride born in me over the fact that Hank did love me despite Mikey's belief that he never could. Not the Hank that the killer thought he knew, I understood, but rather the _true_ one. Mikey only knew the motel manager whom was a predatory, loud mouthed asshole; the act the man had created in large part to protect himself and survive. I had been allowed to see the Hank under the scar tissue: a man whom I had helped towards a healing process that should have started years before I had even stepped off of the plane in L.A.

"They are mine, Mikey," I confessed.

"NO!" he spat. "I like _girls_! Like that young thing in room 214..." he argued, plainly attempting to mimic his hero.

"Is that why you killed her and Jesse?" I asked.

Mikey's eyes opened wide in shock. "The Wildcat? No. She was out of here before I got the chance...but I wanted her and her perfect little body and her cute _little_ ass..."

The man looked at the pair of plus sized underwear, still slung around his fingers, in horror and let them fall by his feet on the floor.

"I WOULDN'T FUCK YOU! I DON'T _WANNA_ FUCK YOU!" Mikey shouted in fury as he pushed me backwards with the blood stained baseball bat.

"HANK!" I screamed in terror knowing that I had lost my chance of escape and Mikey had lost his mind.

I was pushed backwards against the chair, which selfishly rolled out of the way and to the side, until my back was up against the computer desk and monitor.

" _I'M_ HANK, BITCH!" the madman screamed. "THE KING OF JERRY'S! I HAVE MY PICK OF THE CHERRIES AND YOU AIN'T IT!"

He had obviously crossed over the line of simple hero worship long ago and come to believe that he was the man he idolized. Briefly, the thought entered my mind that maybe it was no different than what Hank had done himself. Maybe Mikey had faced his own trauma in the past and the only way he had found to survive was to become something else; in this case it was his only friend. But the thought fled as abruptly as it had come, urged on to a faster flight as Mikey swung the weapon at me with startling force.

I fell to the floor to avoid it and closed my eyes under a rainfall of plastic, mouse, pens and bric and brac while Mikey had a tantrum and made a mess of the workspace. Falling to my hands, I crawled two feet away and then rose to run. Pain flashed through my legs before I could make it to the door, though, making me cry out loudly. I fell back to the floor, experiencing only a glimpse of the agony that Carly Lynn had suffered before her death. There was little time for me to catch the breath used on the scream as Mikey placed the bat under my chin and hoisted my body up with it, making me choke for a moment in the process.

I was pushed like that to the nightstand where the underwear had been lying for the lackey to discover. "You placed them in here," Mikey accused. "That's the only thing that makes sense...I would never even think about looking at somebody like you twice."

"But I _did_ , Mikey," a voice from the doorway said and the killer turned both himself and I around to face Hank.

My lover, in every sense of the word but the physical, was staring at us. His right arm rested against the door frame while his other was hidden behind his body. The gun was waiting there, I knew, but from the look of fear in Hank's eyes I understood he was hesitant to reveal it openly to his friend. Though the bearded man was keeping his voice as calm as he could, it was obvious that he was frightened even more than when he had discovered Carly Lynn's body or told me of his past. He saw Mikey with the bat at my neck, one move away from crushing my windpipe with it, and he saw my death presented before him like some exaggerated one out of the films he had hoped to star in. If he made one wrong move before he was offered a clear shot, I was as dead as the life of a movie star he had come to Hollywood to find.

"I haven't _stopped_ looking since she came here," Hank further confessed as he took one step closer. "You just never noticed. I didn't want you to."

Mikey slid the bat slightly to the left, not in a way which would have started to choke me. I felt his body tensing, however, as he raged internal war with the words of his idol. "You can't, Hank! She's fat and fucking past thirty! Rotten fruit on the vine, man! That's what you said!"

The motel manager winced in remembrance of past words he had said and hoped I would never have to hear. He looked at me in pained regret but I gave him a sad smile of forgiveness.

"That doesn't matter," Hank said, coming closer until he saw Mikey raise the bat and watched me suddenly struggling to breath. "She's sweet, and she feels nice. She tastes good too."

I would have laughed at Hank's one track mind but it was hard to find either the ability or strength.

"NO!" Mikey exclaimed in protest. "She ain't no fuckin' model...ain't a damn centerfold. She ain't even a whore! I DON'T WANT HER! I DON'T WANT HER, HANK!"

"But you aren't _me_ , Mikey," Hank reasoned calmly. "Because if you were, you wouldn't hurt a head on her hair. Because I love her. I _love_ her, Mikey."

I looked into Hank's eyes and he looked into mine and I thought that if it all ended then that maybe it had all been worth it in some strange way. Not all happy endings occurred at the very end of the story and my own had already happened when I had learned that Hank was in love with me. In life, you sometimes accepted the best that it had given to you and forgot about all the misery in between.

"NO!" Mikey continued his tantrum. "I'M A BETTER HANK THAN YOU FUCKIN' ARE! I DON'T FUCK FAT GIRLS."

That pretty well did it. Mikey was not Hank, the man I was in love with, and I'd had pretty well enough of him pretending to be and the insults by then too. It was time to finally do something that as a shy girl (one overly aware and sensitive about her size) I had previously been reluctant to do: throw my weight around.

Knowing that I outweighed the man by several pounds, I purposely fell backwards, praying that by going in the opposite direction to the bat, the pressure on my neck would be relieved. The act took Mikey by surprise and I felt him loosen his hold on me as we fell onto the bed together. Intent on wasting no time, I broke free from my attacker's hold and slipped away from him.

"GET DOWN!" Hank demanded and I fell to the floor for a second time in under five minutes.

Mikey had risen to his feet in alarming speed. I saw the shadow of the baseball bat being aimed high in the air, ready to be brought down on my skull, before several gunshots rang out and hit the man square on his thin chest. I rolled to the side avoiding the killer's body falling down on me, a fact he probably wouldn't have liked any better than I would have.

Using the bottom of the bed to help me rise to my feet, I soon felt Hank's arms around me, helping me to stand also.

"Are you..."

"I'm okay," I said.

The motel manager was suddenly kissing me passionately and alternately studying my face. "I almost lost you," he stated in horrified desperation.

"You didn't," I tried to offer consolation but the man was kissing me again in urgency. His lips found my own and then moved all over my face, until finding my lips again, repeated the journey. "Hank," I said again, almost losing my breath after another kiss.

The man wasn't exactly listening, however. He was pushing me towards the bed and lowering me down on to it, motioning me to move my body up to the head of it. That was when I felt his fully fledged erection brushing against my thigh and I realized that the fright the motel manager had experienced over my potential death had successfully made him forget about the problem he had in becoming aroused by a good girl such as myself. He was passionate and turned on enough to want to take me there and then, proving to every part of his anatomy that he had been successful in saving me.

I was about to tell him to wait, until I realized two things. The first was that the man had finally overcome his specific intimacy trouble and I wasn't about to throw him back into it just because there was a dead man lying to our side. The second was that my hand was already going to the erection and stroking it in my own hunger. Having just almost joined Mikey's list of murdered women, some part of my own body and soul was demanding that I seize every opportunity for love and life while it was still offered to me.

And Hank's love was being _very_ eagerly offered.

I unzipped Hank's zipper while we kissed again, his own hands beginning to remove my jeans after placing the gun on the nightstand beside us.

I finished freeing his cock long before my jeans and underwear were discarded and my own lower half was presented fully to him. In the meantime, I enjoyed feeling the hard piece of flesh in my hand and how it was responding with wetness to my touch.

Exposed at last, Hank spread my legs and gave my clit a few rubs, making sure I was wet enough for him before he took my virginity. I was, though. The man's kisses and unapologetic need for me was the strongest aphrodisiac I could ever have wanted.

"Is this okay?" Hank whispered into my ear.

"Yes," I replied.

He did not need more than that. The motel manager pushed into me. Although we were both wet, and my cunt felt turned on enough to be ready to handle a small transport at that point, the entry still caused a strong flash of pain and I cried out. Instead of slowing down or pulling out, my lover (now in every sense of the word) was not deterred by my discomfort but seemed to believe that it was best to help me walk through the fire to the other side instead. After a few moments, I saw the wisdom in his experience. Pain turned to pleasure soon enough, aided by several whispered confessions of love, how well I was doing and how sexy I was to him.

Once, when the man was kissing my cheek, the first real surge of outright bliss struck me and I moaned as my vagina clenched the penis it no longer saw as something foreign and unwanted but rather as some lost and welcomed friend. My own body began to find it's confidence and Hank lifted my shirt and bra to get at my breasts. I writhed beneath him in ecstasy, making unintelligble sounds as he made love to me for the first time.

We were both at the boiling point in a matter of minutes, our hormones high and surging, brought on by the danger we had just faced and survived.

"I'm coming, Erin," Hank moaned deeply and I felt my own body about to release as well.

Movement caught my eye, an action lost on Hank from his angle lying over me. A shape had shifted from the floor and the body was gone. Seeing Mikey rising at the end of the bed, his baseball bat preparing to swing at Hank's head and looking about ready to hit it off in one strike by the furious momentum of the killer's rage and sense of betrayal, my hand was already reaching for the gun to my side. Quickly, and with a prayer, I aimed it straight over Hank's shoulder and at Mikey's livid face. Releasing the safety and pulling the trigger, I shot Carly Lynn's killer straight between his eyes. At the same time Hank's cock shot a few days worth of saved up cum (the longest it had probably ever held in reserve) into me as my own orgasm struck violently. I was crying out, Hank was spraying out and Mikey's blood was falling out, all in grotesque unison. Convulsing and in relief and release, I watched the biggest fan Hank had ever found for the role he had created fall to the motel room floor, truly dead this time.

I lay panting on the bed as Hank was likewise gasping for breath over me. Our bodies gave their last few shudders and cries and my lover's final spurt of seed was spent. He fell to my side and I rolled over on mine before we held each other in exhausted and well pleased satisfaction. "Looks like you saved me in more ways than one, snowflake," Hank said gently and kissed me on my forehead.

"Funny," I said. "You did the same for me too."

* * *

The cops tied several missing runaways to Jerry's Motel and Mikey Silvain. Jesse's dissapearance was attributed to him as well. Though I tried to tell them that Mikey had claimed innocence to that one crime, my words were believed no more than if I had told them that there were witches in Los Angeles. Even after they had found Mikey's secret burial place in the basement under the motel and the girl was not discovered among the five victims.

"You think she's still out there?" Hank asked me.

"I don't know," I answered. "I just know she's not in Mikey's graveyard."

Sometimes you never knew what had happened to someone. Some people just dropped off the face of the earth and you spent the rest of your life looking for them and wondering what had happened. All I knew was that L.A. had consumed Jesse in one way or another and that all I could hope was that there was enough of her soul left to find its peace in a far more gentler land than one that profited off of beauty until it had transformed it into something ugly and no longer recognizable.

The Shaws, at the agonizingly least, knew what had happened to their Christina.

I gave the unicorn doll to her mother when she visited the motel after hearing the sad truth about her daughter's death and I had informed her I wished to return something Christina would have wanted her to have. I had hidden it away from the policemen, seeing no great importance it served as evidence but a far greater one it could fulfill as a remembrance. The woman had held on to it tightly until Evelyn Shaw had asked to see it. Carly Lynn's sister had looked at the white horse with the pink mane and yellow horn until she had burst into tears and clutched the toy close to her heart. All the while, Randy had stood to the side looking guilty. It was too late for apologies now, I knew. All that the young woman was left with was regret, one which would subtlely taint every good memory she had of her sister until she died too and they were reunited.

I stayed by Hank's side during the following weeks until the whole thing died down, being there for him and helping him be strong in the resulting newstorm when both he and Jerry's were constantly in the papers. We made love often and without a supposed corpse on the floor, finding our relationship growing stronger.

Strong enough for me to tell him one night that I had to go back to Canada to see my own sister in person and straighten things out between us before we became like Christina and Evelyn: two sisters with a far greater distance separating them than just a lousy border.

"I'll be back," I told him as we lay in bed together naked but unashamed of our less than perfect bodies.

"I know you will," Hank said. "You trust me while you're gone?"

"Without a doubt," I said, kissing his sweat covered chest. My OCD had had quite a few words about that particular subject but I had more trust in Hank than I had in it. It had never saved me from a madman. I knew, Hank was a far better man than he even suspected. "Do you trust yourself?"

"Maybe not before. But with you, Erin, yeah, I do," he said, kissing the top of my own sweaty head.

* * *

Hank walked me to the bus station which would take me to the airport and we kissed and embraced each other passionately, earning several tourists curious gazes before I climbed on to the bus.

Staring at him standing there below me and already seeming so lost and abandoned I held out my hand. "Come with me," I told him gently.

His eyes drifted to my hand and then back to my eyes. "What? Just up and leave the country?"

"You keep that passport on you for a reason, Hank," I reminded him. "Now you know why."

Looking to his side, he swore and then looked back at me. "What about my responsibilities? If I leave with you now, Erin, there's no chance I'm coming back, girl. And business at Jerry's is now booming after all the morbid free publicity and all the fucking freaks."

"Jerry's served its purpose," I whispered. "Now it's time to find a new home."

Hank laughed bluntly. "Where's that snowflake?"

A smile took hold of my lips and I gazed down at him in the promise that wherever we would find ourselves carried to on the wind, as long as we were together, we could call it home.

The manager of Jerry's placed his dirty shoe on the first step and reached out his hand. Our fingers locked together and we both entered the public transportation, drifting in on the slight breeze of the bus door sliding shut behind us, as Hank willingly became just another runaway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really want to thank the lovely MoonCrone first for this. I never had a constant reader to a fic in this series before you. Can I tell you how much your support meant? No. The dictionary does not contain enough words to serve that purpose. Picture every positive adjective ever created, even the slang ones in years to come, and that is how I feel for you and your kindness. :D <3
> 
> I'm gonna miss this fic. I love Hank. This was fun to write and tested me on several fronts. Mysteries aren't my strong point and this was the first one for this series. But I had a blast with this. It was meant to be only a one shot. It grew. Hee hee. That ending was always planned, though, and those final words. We started out with Carly Lynn, a teenage girl, being just another runaway and then we subvert that by showing that even a middle aged man like Hank can be one too. We all have things to run away from. Sometimes we should stay and sometimes we should leave. Wisdom, time and living often informs us when it is best to remain or when it is better for us to go.
> 
> But it will always be best when there is someone there to take our hand and cares to lead us to somewhere safe. May you all have safe places and caring companions.
> 
> Thank you all for reading. And you especially again, MoonCrone! *hugs* I'm gonna miss you!
> 
> Much love,  
> Erin  
> :D <3
> 
> P.S. I haven't forgotten you, Keanu. *blows kiss* I love you, friend! Thanks for giving us Hank! :D <3


End file.
